After a bit of a hiatus, I’m ready to finally get started on a 300 gallon in wall tank. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, I purchased this tank circa 2012 when I lived in California (still active duty military) with the intent to upgrade my meager 125 gallon. The price for the 300 gallon was so right that I couldn’t pass it up. However, the 125 was doing so well and the logistics of where the new tank was going to go posed a bit of a challenge, which means the tank never made its way off the enclosed trailer I picked it up in.
I retired in 2014 and in 2015 we moved back to a house we own in Wyoming. I set up the 125, why, you might ask?... Well, that one was basically turnkey and because I couldn’t go without a tank for too long! There in Wyoming, I had the perfect place to put the tank, which was in a wall that joined the family room with a small bedroom. The small bedroom was to become the fish room and it shared a wall with a bathroom, which meant plumbing issues were going to be at a minimum.
However, my wife was still working for a company in California that allowed her to do the job remotely, which meant that she needed to set up an office space….You can probably guess where this is going… Yep! The 300 again fell by the wayside, however, it no longer resided in the trailer, I had a spot for it in the garage…. PROGRESS!
After a year in Wyoming, due to some unforeseen circumstances we decided to uproot yet again and move to Phoenix AZ. This time, when house hunting, I kept my eyes peeled for a house with the perfect spot for the tank, we found one, but got into a bidding war and we bowed out. The runner up had a spot that wasn’t ideal but I could make it work. At this point the trick was to lay claim to the spot before it ended up as a storage area...or an office space!
Here it is: A small walk in closet that shares a wall with the living room and stairs on the other side. I needed to push 2 walls out roughly 13 inches on both. You can see with the blue painters tape where the new walls were going to be.
The first challenge I ran into was that the wall that will have the tank is load bearing. I had to call in an architect to draw up plans to support that floor above over the existing concrete footer and then frame in the new wall. I was given 2 choices:
1. remove the concrete where the new wall will go, dig a 30” footer, rebar and tie back into existing concrete slab so that the new wall will support the load
2. incorporate a glue laminated beam to support the floor above the existing footer and extend out the load with a steel beam on the floor to carry the load of the extra 13 inches on the wall with the door.
Choice no 1 was ideal but destroying the concrete slab in which the house resided was out of the question and definitely not in th budget. So no 2 it is!
Let’s start the demo!
Pulled of all the drywall to expose the studs, cut power to the electrical wires that ran through.
Exposed the underbelly of the stairs, that’s useable real estate!
Grabbed a diamond blade and cut out the tile in which the new wall will go:
Removed the tile and cleaned it up. What a pain this was!!!
Removing all the thin set from the concrete was tough too!
