Shed, your days are numbered!

One of the biggest obstacles currently preventing me from moving in to this house is the current lack of hot water on my side of the double. The gas line to the hot water heater, which ran the length of the house, was allowed by the previous owner(s) to deteriorate to a dangerous level of unusability. In order to get the furnace running last winter (to keep the interior at an appropriate temperature for the floor refininshing), I was forced to cut and cap the bad line, which completely disconnected the hot water heater from the gas system. Thus, no hot water for many moons now.

I have decided that I want to put in a tankless hot water heater, and mount it to the back of my house. Unfortunately there was a very large, dilapidated problem standing right in the way of progress: the shed. This shed clearly had a colorful history. It had obviously been Frankenstein'd together using floorboards (for door material, mind you), old beams, and most disturbingly, parts of other, prior sheds. One wall contained an old window oriented the wrong way... crazy.

The shed was so dilapidated, in fact, that when I bought the house my insurance company said I had to "do something with it" or they wouldn't insure me. So last summer we spent a weekend or two re-roofing it and putting support framing and some sheeting on the outside. I painted it and it looked ok, from the outside, but man! The shed was divided in two by load-bearing, unremovable wall. In one half, my non-functioning water heater and the washing machine. In the other, my tenant's actual water heater and the dryer. What this meant was that, in order to move a load of laundry from the washer to the drier, you had to carry the clothes out of the shed, all the way around to the other side.

Relevant to my immediate plans, the shed was taking up space on the back of the house where I want to move the water heater. And really, I have been looking forward to getting this thing torn down for over a year...

Now, in order to be able to tear down the shed, we had some major work to do for my tenant first. We had to a) figure out a new location for her hot water heater and b) ensure that she still had a place to do laundry. Enter Dave, who has been an amazing help to me. He's the guy that put in the plumbing for the bathroom renovation a few weeks ago.

Step one: Move water heater from shed to tenant's closet:


Attach plumbing:




Install venting with blue, fire-resistant caulk:
(Note: expect funny looks when you ask for "FireCaulk" at Home Depot)

Outside:

Inside:
Squeeze Stackable washer and drier into closet next to water heater:



Add louvered doors to hide the plumbing ugliness:


And Voila! Now we are much closer to tearing down the shed, and then installing hot water on the owner's side!