Wednesday

 

The plumber came this morning and stayed all day. He installed the new tub drain, pictured above.

Lots of tools.

He got the tub filler parts laid out, along with the directions. The concrete brick will be the pad he attaches the valve to before it gets incased in concrete. We all thought it was a shame to have to cover up the beautiful brass valve. One thing is for sure: that tub filler will not wobble, which is a common problem with the less expensive fillers that attach to the surface of the concrete floor. Since the plumbers were going to need a trench beneath the concrete floor for the water supply (and the tub drain), it made sense to get a higher quality tub filler with a valve encased in the concrete. 

The center of the round tub is where the drain will be.

It looks like the tub filler will not exactly line up with the corner and the center of the drain without jackhammering the outer footing. The filler will need to go a bit to the left of the center line. I've asked our designer what she thinks about that.

You can see in my sketch above that the filler is slightly out of line with the corner of the linen closet and the outside wall and the center of the tub. I don't think it will be noticeable. We'll see what the designer says.

I've placed the linear shower drain in the shower picture above. The wall is the outside front wall of the house. The current drain is in the lower left of the picture, beside my foot. The slope will go from the bottom of the picture down to the drain at the top of the picture. The plumber will have to move the drain to match up with the linear drain. I think he's going to have to do some more jackhammering, but just for the pipe that connects in the center of the linear drain. He has to remove the old copper pipes anyway that run up the wall, and they all meet in the same place. 

Our dishwasher is designed for the door to pop open at the end of the cycle to allow steam to escape. It's supposed to be more energy efficient than using a heating element. You can see the two little rectangular  prongs in the picture above that punch outward to open the door. Our door failed to open the last two washes.

I did some research and discovered it's a common problem with Samsung dishwashers. The picture above is of the solenoid that was apparently poorly designed, not strong enough to push the door open repeatedly. The redesigned part works better. Our salesperson at the appliance store who is also a neighbor warned us that Samsung dishwasher have lots of service issues. We preferred the LG, but we needed white glass to go with our refrigerator, so we didn't have much choice since Samsung is the only company with white glass appliances, at least when we purchased ours last year. 

I learned a lot about various codes from the discussion board. That helped me to troubleshoot the problem and possible solutions: turn the circuit breaker off and then on 30 seconds later to reset the computer or use lithium grease on the door prong in case it is too tight going into the door latch. I also learned that the door does not pop open on the sanitary cycle because the steam would be too hot. The most likely solution for our problem is to replace the solenoid. Luckily, the dishwasher is still under warranty, so I'm glad it failed now instead of latter. We have a service technician scheduled for next Tuesday. I sent the technician the part number just in case.

Late this afternoon, we started getting heavy rain and wind from the outer bands of Hurricane Helene. The eye will pass off to our west with landfall as a category 4 near Apalachicola, passing to the west of Tallahassee if all goes as predicted. We will get storm surge and lots of rain. I'm glad that we are high and dry. Still the winds could be over 40 mph.