I have not seen a rear-discharge concrete truck in use (or even on the road) here since I was a kid.

I don't know how the drivers watched the discharge when it was at the rear actually.

Kevin kept his eyes on AFC CONSTANTLY.

It was like a symphony, with AFC as conductor, using his hands to signal when he wanted more or less, but it was so very subtle.  Kevin caught every nuance.

He never took his eyes off of AFC except when he was moving his truck.

It was amazing.

ETA:  I got the sense that for Kevin, it was a challenge.

Can I get to that?

Hell I'm gonna get to that.

Hell yeah, I'm gonna get to that.

And he did.

These are six-wheel drive.  

I learned this from the gravel dump truck driver who was whining about having to back into my site.    He was all like, "yeah the concrete guy did it but he has six-wheel drive"...grumble grumble grumble..

I had not thought of those options.  I have no idea how long it would need to dry (dry being a relative term in our humidity).  I think I would still have to use an underlayment that could take both light and water, since the shrinkage of the wood would pretty much guarantee some exposure (much like old barnwood).   That might be okay.

It's a good idea and I think I will look into this. We have some Amish right down the road.  They have portable mills. I wonder if they would do it.

Hmmm...I wonder what kind of bug issues I might get into (if any) with this.  Maybe no more than barnwood.

So the day after the guys left, with the end of the block foundation still not built, I started on the drain system.

I made some mistakes.

FIRST MISTAKE:
Assuming that the handyman guy I work with all the time--really EXCELLENT HANDYMAN--who is good at a LOT of thing--.can rough in plumbing.  I wanted a second hand, yaknow? Thought it would make it go faster, he'd help me wrangle the 4" pipe, and I'd have a second set of eyes in case I had a brain fart.  I wanted the proverbial "bounce off of the other person" guy.

Yeah...no.

He freaks out when there's nothing there.  He cannot "see" it.  He also does not understand the nuances of pvc (It's Tinker Toys.  Some of the holes in the tinker toy "spools" were set at an angle.  You learned to use those angles.)


He cost me a day of my time, and a day of his PAID time.  I had to redo a bunch of what we did because...you know..he needed to lead cuz he's male, so I let him. (I've learned it's better to do this if you want to actually get anything done, and keep your good help on your payroll)  

Yeah, he got it wrong.

That's okay.  I paid him.  He's still my best handyman. (He will leave another job to come and help me on something I need. That's valuable.  He is better at a good many things than I am.  That's valuable, too.  He also does not mind working with a female.  That is pure gold.  I don't know another contractor in my area who will hire on and expect to do the work using me as his help, understanding he will have a capable hand.  It saves me a BUNCH of money when I can work this way.)

Lesson learned.  Guy is not a rough-in plumber.  Lesson learned beyond that....because you can REPAIR SOMETHING dose not mean you can BUILD SOMETHING.  I think I just assumed everybody could do this because I can.  Well..newsflash....they can't.

More on that later, but ...okay got it...moving on.

SECOND MISTAKE:

There was no gravel on site when I started.  I knew gravel would be useful.  My master plumber buddy (who talked me through how it worked and told me I could do this)  had told me it would help.  But I still don't have the sides built for my trailer so I can haul loose stuff like gravel, and honestly, I wasn't sure I could haul more than three cupfuls without overloading the thing.    I knew gravel was inbound at some point, but MY mistake was not spending the time to attach some boards to the trailer and go get gravel that first day, even if it was only 500 lbs worth.  Once the big load of gravel arrived, things got MUCH easier.


So the first thing was to get the closet setup and main vent T in place, since the whole system revolves around that.    I had to text my concrete guy (AFC) with a photo and say, "hey, does it matter if this fitting protrudes into the slab?"  I didn't know.  Cuz...OMG, CONCRETE!!!! (YEAH, more on that later, too.)




I had Handyman Guy (HG) on site at that point, and he was making me nuts.  I kept saying, "you know, if you just twist that elbow a little, it will change the slope of the whole system below it.  

No matter how many times I explained this, I still don't think he got it.  He just could not hear it for whatever reason.  Maybe he wouldn't hear it because he's not used to me being the one with greater understanding.  Either way, HG did not get it.  So I sent him home, pretending that I was going to knock off for the day, then I came back out and worked until it was so dark I could not see.

The next day I was up at the crack of dawn, thinking about the whole thing on my own, and doing MUCH better.

One of AFC's guys came over to meet a gravel truck.

After much griping, (and impressive finessing by AFC's young guy,, Ian) the truck driver backed up the slope and between the fence posts, and dumped a load  of #9 beside the laid block (in my future "carport" which will (I hope) hold my dad's old Allis Chalmer tractor if I can figure a way to get it here from the barn at my mom's house.)


At my request, Ian used the trackhoe to scoop some gravel and pile it near my "plumbing pit" (which he had dug a day or two before.  The guys have been great about using their equipment to help me not have to do a lot of digging.)  

So a couple of hours later, I had this.... (Does that shadow make me look fat?)



MISTAKE #3:

Not trusting myself to start at the closet bend and main stack, and build outward from there.

I am SO VERY visual.  I needed to see the whole picture before I started to put it together.

So I actually glued up the pipe from the tub (the long, saggy one coming from the left) thinking I could trust at least that.   Even as I glued it together I was thinking, "this is dumb."
 

It's not that I didn't know better.  This is not my first go at plumbing.  Not by a LONG way.  I would never have attempted a rough-in if I hadn't done a fair bit of plumbing before.

It's that the whole "we're going to cover this with concrete" thing was freaking me the heck out.  I blew off a lot that I instinctively knew, because I needed to see the whole thing in place before I started the glue-up on the main stack and toilet.

Live and learn.

Two day later, I had this (Actually the closet section was dry fit in place before this at some point. I didn't take a lot of photos because I was focused on getting this right.)



It was about this point that I kept measuring, trying to figure out where the tub vent should go, when something just was NOT working.

The beauty of having walls laid out by a master craftsman, and a tape measure to figure distances from those (stationary) walls, is that you can tell whether or not your interior walls are actually where they should be.

"Say Goodnight Gracie"

"Goodnight, Gracie!"

Showing my age here.

I measured from one direction, then the other.

Then I measured again.

THEY ARE NUMBERS. THEY SHOULD WORK.  RIGHT?????

Why aren't they working?


Okay yeah, I had a rough idea, and a drawing on graph paper of the dimensions.  (actually I had drawings on graph paper with the studs in place. )

But for the bathroom, I had way more than that.

I started with this...(still not certain I won't position the tub this way)



Ended with this:



But spent some time at night with a calculator getting some to-the-inch measurements to get the plumbing in place.



They weren't working because I was trusting what my handyman guy (HG) had done that first day with the rough layout.

I felt (that first day) like he was rushing it.  But I hadn't noticed any errors at that point.  Just that he was freaking out and he couldn't visualize what was not already there.

Well..

He was six inches off on the whole thing.

I was trusting his measurements for the first wall.  I was going off of that, and could not figure out why the other walls didn't work.

Lesson learned.  

His wall was wrong.

Once I got that figured out, I picked up the whole system I had built and moved it back six inches (did a little digging for this) and..

POOOF.

Suddenly my math worked.

I learned some things about what you need to rough in plumbing for concrete.





I admit that there was some overkill...







I had Handyman Guy back out on Tuesday (nice of him to come out on short notice) to help me manage the 4" pipe to get the drain outside the structure.  Cutting a ten-foot section of 4" PVC even half way straight with a chopsaw, you need a second person.  HG was it for me.

BONUS: He also knew how to knock the hole in the concrete block wall, which was freaking me out. He'd seen it done before.  

I admit that NOW I am not overly impressed with the security provided by a concrete block building, after seeing how easily we could knock holes in it with a regular old hammer.  

After this, I finished the glue-up on the rest of it. (I had to totally redo the whole tub section.)


So  This was Friday night:



It's embarrassing how long it took.  But I worked from before the sun came up until I could not see to work, all through the weekend.

On Tuesday night, I had this, with the sun setting on one side...



and the nearly-full moon rising on the other side...




I think I lost 10 lbs over that weekend.

I am not posting the angles that show my pipes are not all perfectly straight (I did level them.  Every one.  But apparently there's a trick.)

Hey, it's my first time.  Haters can go suck sour eggs laced with well whiskey.

Water poured in the high pipes ends up in the low pipe OUTSIDE the freaking foundation.  I think that's what counts.

Wanted to do a proper test, but my test cap at the low end had a hole in it.  So it wouldn't hold water.  

I was able to back water up into several vents, though.

Yeah, Kitties has no plan to be a plumber.

Just sayin.

All these long posts have been catch up.  They will now be shorter and more in real-time.

I posted that last late and I was tired. I see I got the wrong photo in there at a spot or two. I'll correct that when I get some time.

I have one more post with the forms for the tub box and shower pan installed, but at that point, rain was coming, so I shoveled as much gravel as I could before dark, trying to keep the dirt from moving under the pipes and wrecking my slope, and there it sits.  My yard is shin-deep mud right now.  Won't be getting concrete this week because it keeps raining.  

I do have a lot of fixtures.

Basically I'm building the infrastructure into the drain system so that I can do anything I want with this building in the future.

the plumbing includes

Toilet of course
nice-size shower
leg tub
lavatory
sink in a little kitchenette (mostly because I have this awesome sink with a drainboard that we pulled out of this olde house when we bought it. I've wanted it somewhere forever, so I'm putting it in for an "art sink" and making it a little kitchenette for guests, so they can make coffee, wash a coffee cup...be comfortable and have what they need.)
washer stand pipe (with trap in wall)
utility sink
dog tub (this is basically an old cast iron tub (which I also pulled out of this house) built up on concrete blocks. We've always had a lot of animals, and baths in a regular tub break your back.  I've wanted a dog tub forever.  Now's my chance to build in the plumbing, though the dog tub may never actually happen.)

Not all of that will go in immediately.  Some of it may NEVER go in.  But pvc is cheap, and since "OMG CONCRETE" there ain't no later, in my world.  I have no plan to bust up this slab.

@SparkyD ..

Explain the 2 X 4 as stabilizer?

ARe you saying drive a 2 X into the ground and use plumber's strapping and screws to hold the system in place?  I can certainly see how that could be more stable than what I'm doing.

Right now I'm using rebar and duck tape.  But that only does so much.  I've had a hell of a time with that long run over to the tub.  It helped a little that I had to move where it met the bigger pipe, so I ended up with a coupler in the middle, which actually helped with the sag a little.  But I've still had to build it up on "hard things"--pieces of concrete block, etc.

I couldn't take my normal route of just shoving the drain end up higher because I was already fudging my contractor's orders to leave him 4" plus an inch of gravel, for 5" total, above the horizontal runs.  

So I was juggling

a-needing to keep this as high as possible so that I don't have to lift to get to the septic.

b-needing to keep it low enough that he has what he needs

c-needing to get enough slope that even with a little settling in some spots, the system will still run.

Rookie rough-in plumbers, raise your hand!!!  *raises hand*

It's been a long week. You're gonna have to type a little more.

Where and what for?

@ar-jedi

OH!  @Rat_Patrol

I should add on the fixtures...it looks like a little more than it is maybe because I hard vent everything.  

I do not web vent.  I do not fudge on the vents AT ALL.

My shower was like two feet from my main stack. But I vented it.

It's WAY overkill, but every house I've plumbed this way runs.  It doesn't burp. It doesn't run slow. It doesn't back up.  It runs like a freaking tank.

I like plumbing that runs, so I do what has always worked for me.

Not as cheap or quick, but there's usually a way to do it, so I do.  Every fixture has its own vent.

I'm a little worried about the tub vent, actually.  It's basically level.  Water COULD back up into it, and there would go my drain, since that fixture is far away from any other vent.  But I don't have the height to raise the vent stub out, or I will be in the 4" pad.

Does the green pipe go in the same way as schedule 40?  

I was looking at that, but I would have to go all the way up to six inch, then back down to meet the schedule 40 going into my septic, so it didn't make sense over the span of a hundred feet.

I've never used the green.

Okay wait.  @Ar-jedi

The photo with the pipes sticking up out of the concrete..

Explain what that's for?

I am still at the point of saying, "How the eff am I going to get electric to this building?"

So although all the things you've mentioned have crossed my mind, I have no plan.

If I need to put it in before the concrete, I have exactly two days to get my shit together.

Explain it to your four year old.

That'll help at this point.


I'm going...it's plastic conduit...how will I get whatever I want through it????

Do I run fish tape through it NOW, and leave it sticking out each end?  Or waht???

Some history:

I started planning this building as storage for uxb and me, and a close friend who was contracting in a sandy environment.

( I am helping with the rehab on said friend's house, and we need a place to store his stuff, and ours.)

A few months into planning, I realized that when our friend comes home from the sand, and his house is either uninhabitable because of construction, or rented to someone else, he will be spending a lot of money on hotels.

So...if we took that money (times 2 or 3 visits) and tossed it into the building, we could add a "guest quarters" for our friend, which could double as a studio for me, and a much more functional building than just a shell where we shove stuff to keep it out of the weather.  

Of course, that meant plumbing and more electrical than a few shop lights.  We'd already planned hvac as a part of the storage facility, but now we would need actual comfort.

So a bathroom was an obvious inclusion.

I had already gotten the estimate from my Awesome Foundation Guy (AFC)when I figured out that I'd like a curbless shower.  

How could I accomplish this without adding to AFC's work load?

I don't believe in switching up the contract in the middle of things, or asking a contractor to do extra.  And I didn't really have any extra in the budget to say, "I want this, so whatever it costs, add it."

After posting a thread in DIY about the concrete slab, an arfcom member @billhw1 bumped me with an IM, suggesting how to get what I was after....a curbless shower...without changing the contract.

If I added a form that would drop the level of the concrete in the shower pan area, AFC could pour up to the bottom of that form within the shower pan, then pour at normal level outside that form.

Billhw1 actually emailed me a schematic of how to set up these forms.

I showed it to AFC.

AFC said, "yep, that'll work."

So I built the forms.  First form was a tub box and since I'm putting in a leg tub, I needed it bigger than normal.  Depending on which tub I use, that drain could vary a lot, so I need room to manipulate the trap (or cut it out and replace it if necessary) to get to the exact spot.

Here you can see the tub box in the background.



For the shower, though, I didn't have the height for a 3.5" form to lower the pan that much.  If I kept the horizontal pipe runs 5" below floor level, I had only 2" to spare.  

I wanted those two inches, though, because to build a curbless shower, I need enough space to build a shower mortar bed, with enough slope to drain properly, without the tile being higher than the existing bathroom floor.  

AFC came over to pick up a piece of equipment to use on another job, and I showed him my forms:



He said he was worried about me having enough room at the shower drain for my mortar bed.

Yeah, I was worried about that too.

He said, "what if I create a preslope with the concrete, by sloping the gravel?  It'll be rough, but it'll give you some room to play.

Me:  

He says he can do this, so we're going to try it.

Have I said before that my foundation contractor is awesome?

wut????

Thanks!!!

@billhw1 thank you for the idea about how to accomplish what I was after.  I would have been forced to settle for a curbed shower, or build up my concrete floor with Durock, which makes no sense at all.

@Handydave

Did your garage get wrapped?  Or have y'all had too much rain? (We've had rain. And rain. Aaaaand rain.)

It's been raining for the past five days.  My back yard is a mud pit.  I think we didn't get any rain today (I was out of town) but it will take a bit for the yard to dry out, which means NO concrete this week.

But..

AFC called last week and said, "hey, I need to ask a favor.  I've got this load of concrete I could bring to you for fill instead of taking it to the dump."

Me: OH HELLZ TO THE YEAH.

I'd just paid $430 for a load of gravel.  I'd like to not do that as a regular thing, yaknow?

So later that evening, I heard some crashing and banging in the back yard.

He was dumping this.



It was part of a driveway he'd torn out as part of a contract to correct a drainage issue (as in, water was draining into a person's house instead of the other direction)

I would actually like to have two MORE loads of it, and know how to use the trackhoe, because I would take those pieces and turn them into landscaping.

a-an awesome path through the yard to the new "barn"

b-the most awesome terraced walls in the universe.

Yup.  

But I'm not getting any of that.

He will bust that up and put it inside the block walls for fill, so I don't have to buy so much gravel.

Did you build the new door (to replace the green door) yourself?

The blue tape makes me ask this.  I'm assuming you just applied the finish.

ETA:  Nothing you post of this sort will EVER be considered as clutter in one of MY threads.

Thank you.

Aaaaah that makes perfect sense.

Actually I was worried I couldn't even bury power and data in the same ditch.  What is your knowledge of the shielding provided by  conduit, and how far should the data lines be from the power cables?

Thank you!  

5'1.5" but that's not me in any of the photos.

Okay y'all...

tell me why I should love Pex instead of hate it?

I can't make a turn.

I crimped it trying to get even sort of a bend.

In an effort to make a straighter stub-out, I put it in these two pieces of pipe with the street elbow but I couldn't force it through with them together, so they're not glued up. they're just stuck together.   (It will be turned upright and anchored before the pour, but good grief, I had to lay that concrete block on it just to hold it in place so it wasn't slinky springing all over the darn site.)



I love the idea of not having a fitting under the slab, but for "Kitties who likes nice, neat turns even for wiring", this stuff is....aggravating.

I've heard it won't break if it freezes, and that it will even expand from heat, but will contract right back into its nice, neat shape.  (The chemicals which enable that--not sure I want to think about them, but I've drunk water out of some sort of plastic for years, so whatever.)

Handyman had taped the little brass cap into the end of the pex before I figured out I wasn't supposed to put tape on it,



And at that point I got even more concerned, cuz...."how tough can this crap be if tape adhesive damages it, and what else damages it that will be used in...you know... a building?  And if I can't tape it, how the crap do I anchor it, since it doesn't want to stay anywhere I put it?"

Yeah, copper is going to put my building over budget, but...dang.

I grew up working with cpvc, and I may transition to Flowguard Gold above the slab inside the building, just for ease of use based on familiarity,  but I hear all these people who just love pex, and I want to adopt good practices.


Also, apparenty everybody else stubs out in a wall, but as you can see from my plumbing, my interior bottom plates are already going to be  somewhat riddled with holes for all the drains and vents.  
The one wall that is not riddled will be getting a pocket door, so can't put water there.

I'm considering stubbing out in what "will be" the sink base cabinet, so I can have my "whole-house shutoff" at that point.  I may also put another one in one of those boxes out in the yard outside the building, but let's just say I HATE going out there, digging out the leaves and any dirt that's washed in (which is, invariably, mud) oh and getting crawled on by frogs who harbor in the box, just so I can shut off the water.  I put a second shut off just inside the door to the crawlspace of the house, because of this. (usually that means I don't have to deal with the frogs in the dark)  But...that's right....NO CRAWLSPACE CUZ OMG CONCRETE

So...any suggestions based on experience and practicality are welcome but the big question is....


Why should I love pex?