I Do Work On The House You Know!

Besides going to book sales I actually got some work done this week. I have installed the tankless water heater but still have to hook it up. I got the vent in though. See that window above it? That is why this won't meet code. It is within 4 feet of the vent. The fact that this is a ground floor window that we will never use since we live within city limits where drug addicts would crawl through that window and steal a bottle of aspirin and a roll of toilet paper if they could doesn't seem to matter.



I need to move the water heater over to a basement window location after I tear the fire escape down and level the ground by the window. That might take a year. The reason this is vented here is because there was a huge hole in the wall at this location for what I believe was a chimney for a coal furnace. There is no point in putting in any additional holes. I have to caulk around the black sheet metal but had to allow some stucco work to dry that makes it sit flush with the limestone foundation. There were two other holes in this wall where the air conditioning units fed into the furnaces. They were quite sizable (half a brick) and plugged with lots of 1960s era caulk. I inserted some 1.5" PVC pipe to preserve a hole for a water line and one for an electric socket, then patched around them.
I also cleaned up this mess;



It now looks like this.



I can pour a concrete sidewall in increments and a then work on the other side eventually ending up with basement doors that look something like this;



Then I have to find a project for all that limestone. Maybe I'll make a trebuchet and hurl them at my bad neighbors!