Prepare to be Wow'ed....

....by the snail's pace at which I work.  As I mentioned about two years ago, there was a spot on my closet ceiling that I had been watching for a couple years before that.  It started out as a very tiny stain on the sheetrock.  Over time it continued to slowly grow.  Eventually it became large enough that I started to worry about it.  I ruined one sweater using it as a test sample to catch the water and measure exactly how much it was leaking.

In Christmas of 2009, Widdle Brudda came for a visit, and being the resourceful guy he is, he volunteered (really, he did - there was no arm twisting involved) to take a look at it.  He thought the problem might be the starting-to-curl plastic thing-a-ma-bob around the sewer vent pipe, so he replaced that.  However, he said the pipe felt loose when he made that repair.

So, he got out the big guns and cut a hole in the sheetrock.  The hole became much bigger than expected, but eventually we found there were multiple compounding causes for the leak.  First, it appeared as though somebody didn't like the vent being on the front of the house, so they moved it to the back of the house.  That would have been fine except that with the cathedral ceiling in my loft, they routed the pipe up to the peak of the roof, back down the roof line a little bit, and then up and out the back side of the roof.  For those of you up on your plumbing knowledge, that type of pipe configuration is known as a P-trap.  It's great for drains when you want water to sit in the "P" to prevent sewer gases from coming up the drains.  However, it's not so good on a vent pipe whose purpose is to allow air to come in and out of the sewer system.  Yeah, water sitting in the "P" blocks that flow of venting air.  That was mistake #1.

Mistake #2 was that not only did they form a P-trap, but then they didn't glue the pieces of pipe together.  This meant when water sat in the P, it could leak out of the joints in the pipe pieces onto my drywall.  Not so good.  Bad news #3 was that the pipe that was supposed to go out to the roof had broken where the pipe meets the roof.  So, if rain or snow happened to come in the pipe on the roof, it may or may not go down the pipe.  If it went down the pipe, it would get caught in the P trap.  Lovely.  Water would be on the drywall either way.

Widdle Brudda had to leave for home after doing the surgery on the sheetrock, so I was in charge of calling the plumber to repair the pipe ASAP.  I had a couple options.  He could put a one-way valve in the pipe and have it vent between the drywall and roof.  I would need to leave a portal in the drywall to access the valve as they need to be replaced periodically.  Or, he could vent it to the outside, but I would have to do something different with my drywall configuration.  I chose option #2.  This was the very last week of December 2009.

In January and February (2010), I didn't want to be losing all the heat out the roof, so I worked diligently on getting the new drywall box made and mudded.  By March or April I had primer on the new drywall and bought the new paint for the closet.  I even went as far as emptying my closet and putting up plastic in preparation of painting.  Summer arrived.  I lost my motivation to work on the project.

As previously mentioned, this resulted in my "closet" being split between three locations.  I used the guest bedroom closet, the living room chairs, and the floor of my bedroom for about six months, possibly more.  When I had company coming in October I "cleaned up" and moved the clothes from the living room to more piles on the floor of my bedroom.  Finally in May of 2011 I was in a motivated state and finished the painting, and the beginning of June I cleaned up all the painting and sheetrock mess.  I could move my clothes back in!

It's amazing how nice it is to have all your clothes in one place.  My bedroom suddenly feels extremely spacious without those piles of clothes cluttering it up.  I got fancy and made a little collage as seen below.