Deck Part III - Plumbing?

Onto another week of deck building. We took the weekend off to vacation, but now I'm back to it. This is how the first half of the deck minus stairs turned out:

You can see the "picture framing" I was talking about last week:

It's hard to tell, but I had to rip this end piece down, I didn't plan the gaps well enough to avoid it. It should be hard to see once I put the top stair on, since that's at the same level as the deck.

Here's the meeting between the two deck sections, I left a very small gap between them so there won't be any squeaking from one moving against the other. Hopefully the boards don't shrink too much and cause a larger gap.

This is the height difference between them.

I still need to shorten this gutter and turn it down the stairs. It looks pretty silly now.

On to today's topic, plumbing. In the pictures above, you can see a giant coil of hose. Under that, notched into the deck ledger board, is our water spigot. I obviously don't what to leave a hand-sized gap in my deck and bend way over to turn our water on whenever we need it, so I decided to move the spigot up. Inside the house, the old owners used PVC for the run of pipe from the middle of the basement to the house rim. From there, they used a frost-free sillcock to get outside. In case you don't know what a sillcock is (I didn't) it's just a metal pipe with a faucet on the end. I had two options: attach to the current sillcock and do a 180 degree turn to raise the spigot with a pipe, then install a new faucet. This would be the lazier route, since I wouldn't have to remove any existing plumbing. It wouldn't be ideal though, since water would sit in the 180 degree turn in the winter and I'd have no way to get it out without removing the fittings, which will be under the deck. Also, I don't really need two knobs to turn, especially since one would be inaccessible under the deck.

My other option, and the one I chose, was to remove the sillcock and replace it with a pipe, a 90 degree, another pipe up, another 90 degree, and the faucet. The PVC was chemically welded together, and the sillcock wasn't coming out of it without breaking everything, so I had to cut the PVC. So I cut it, removed the sillcock, installed a new PVC fitting on the end that the new pipe could screw into, and screwed in the pipe. It was a little more involved than that, so I'll explain a little more.

I screwed the metal galvanized pipes and fittings together with thread tape on the threads. I screwed the female PVC fitting onto the pipe after sliding it into the house. It's a female fitting since the threads go into it, and it slips over the raw PVC pipe. I put PVC primer and cement all over the outside of the PVC pipe and the insead of the PVC fitting, with two coats inside the fitting. Then it was just a matter of sliding the pipe into the fitting, giving it a little twist, and holding it there for 60 seconds. After 2 hours, it's fully cured and looks just fine. Again, I forgot to take pictures, so I'll have to add them later if I remember.

So that was Tuesday, now I can work on the decking today (Wednesday) if I don't get too carried away with my new computer toy (solid-state drive).

As always, thanks for reading, and don't forget to check out my wife's online artwork at etsy.com/shop/ArtistiCass. She has new business cards too, so ask me about them when you see me!