Search

Plumbing a Small House

Tara Miller
Aug 4, 2017
2 min read

Our first connection: septic system to the house.

You would figure only plumbing for two bathrooms, one kitchen sink, one washer and two hose bibs would be a walk in the park, until you actually do it. Given that this is a small house we don't have to lean on convention to find the best way to accomplish a task; in fact, often convention is certainly NOT the best way. This was again the case with our Beekeeper's Bungalow. We started breaking the mould by using PEX tubing for most of our water lines instead of PVC.

PEX being delivered with full escort

PVC is still used for drains, joins and vents but our water lines are all PEX. It is great stuff, easy to run, handle and it is comes in Red and Blue so you know which line is hot and which cold. We also purchased 2 manifolds in which to centralize our waterlines.

The first wall in our house. Garrett milled six inch ship lap from plywood to house our PEX manifolds and tankless water heater under the stairs.

The water heater installed with a few PEX connections made. We ran the hot water lines first since it would connect right to the water heater.

Our cold water manifold up close.

Hot water manifold with labels

These manifolds (one for hot and one for cold) really helps when and if we need to turn off a water line with a quickness. The PEX lines are easily marked so each can be labeled. Running the PEX between floors, between joists and around corners was much improved over PVC. The PEX made it easier to install our whole house, electric tankless water heater. We are really looking forward to turning this water heater on and seeing it in action.

Here's our tankless water heater. I chose a whole house water heater that would be able to adequately heat our well water and run it to several fixtures at once. More info on choosing the best tankless water heater in my next blog post.

Tankless water heater

Plumbing our whole house took about 4 weekends because we did have a friend who is a plumber come and give us a list of supplies, and help us one weekend. The other weekends it was just Garrett running all the lines and making all the connections. With a four piece and three piece bath, washer, dishwasher, kitchen sink, ice maker, two hose bibs, a water heater and incoming from a well, there was a good deal of lines to be run. When drawing the plans you can never really appreciate how much work each addition is really going to be until you look back on all you have done. Even having whittled it down to the minimum that we can comfortably live with plumbing this house was still a lot of work, money and time. Though must less because of careful planning, shopping and avoiding convention (and because it is a small house!)