As you can see from the strip of unmudded, unpainted drywall and the conspicuous lack of a shower door, we’re not quite done– the shower door is running late and should be here later this week, and they’ll take care of that part of the wall and a couple of other very minor tasks at that time. But I’d say we’re 90% done, and we threw a shower curtain on a tension rod on there so that we can shower in 24 hours after everything finishes curing, and the new floor is completely done.
So, progress? I’ll take it. Now we just have to figure out how to tie everything together, because the existing towels and bathroom mats and art on the walls do not work nicely with the blue in the new shower surround. But hopefully this fucker won’t leak.
New subfloor in the bathroom and putting in most of the drywall;
Pulling up the vinyl in the laundry room to discover the enormous extent of the water damage in there (and I’m pretty sure those are asbestos tiles);
Pulling the washer, dryer, and slop sink and getting rid of the rest of the vinyl, then cutting out the damaged subfloor;
Installing the new, one-piece shower pan. I dare you to soak through that, water!
Two more days, supposedly, and given how fast they’ve been working (and that the new flooring showed up today) I’m pretty convinced* that it’s actually going to happen. They’re not working on Sunday, but we ought to be done on Monday.
Remember four and a half years ago, when weredid the master bathroom? Quite possibly not, as I doubt there are a ton of you who have been around that long. Well, it doesn’t matter, because we’re doing it again! Turns out that the new/old shower leaked. A lot! Which was the whole reason we redid it in the first place– because the first shower leaked, and we replaced it, and now the second shower has leaked, possibly worse than the first one did, and now we’re replacing that, and I’m down a bathroom again for, hopefully, just a few days. They’re telling us they’re going to be done by Monday, assuming everything shows up– we’re still waiting on the door and the flooring but that should be in tomorrow or Saturday, and it’ll be the last stuff to get done anyway, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
The flooring this time will extend into the laundry room, off there to the left, and we’re keeping the same vanity and cabinet and mirror and toilet and bidet we had before, and we are hoping not to have to repaint. We have gone with a built-in shower because I hate tile eternally and forever; I love the fact that the only tile in this house that has held up is the tile that I installed, in the hallway bathroom, and by “I love the fact” I need you to understand that I hate tile and I hate grout and I will hate them until twelve years after I die. At any rate, we’ll see how the new look for the shower works with the new floor tile (it’s not tile, it’s vinyl rectangles, but whatever) and then we’ll see if we need to do anything else with color to pull the room together. I’m worried that the room is going to look a little mismatched with the dark woods but no more dark tile.
At any rate, expect me to be screaming into the abyss for the next few days.
(Oh, also, summer school is finished as of today, so I’m on For Real For Real Summer Break now for the next month or so.)
Tonight was actually a really nice first day back, but in the way of every First Day of School, I have a sore throat; spending all day projecting my voice after over a week of talking 1) normally and 2) much less can be kind of brutal. I also don’t have a ton to talk about, so I’m just going to vaguely wave hello in everyone’s direction and go read a book or something.
(Actually, quick question: anyone familiar with Sentrel Bath Systems? If you are, mind dropping your thoughts on the product into comments?)
Don’t tell anybody, because I’ll deny it, but if school started tomorrow, other than needing maybe half an hour to clean up a few things and put some stuff away, my room is ready to go. It’s not finished, mind you, but it’s the kind of unfinished where if someone who wasn’t me walked in, they wouldn’t be able to tell. No one is going to look in an empty corner and go “Weren’t you planning on putting your hex lights there?”
I have two more days this week before teachers are officially back on Monday. All good. Time for something to go terribly wrong, in fact.
The problem is, the whole rest of the building is not me, and I just realized today how much trouble the rest of the building is in. There were a lot more teachers back today, and … yeah. There are a bunch of things that absolutely must be finished in a week in order to open school, and … I have my doubts. And from what I’m hearing, although this is entirely hearsay, the other middle schools are worse off than we are.
There are no functioning student bathrooms in the building, for example. The bathrooms were all completely gutted over the summer, and the sinks are in but there are no toilets or urinals, nor are there any partitions, because you need the toilets in place before you put in toilet stalls. You literally cannot open a school if none of the hundreds of students who go there have anywhere to pee. Na Ga Ha Pen. And that’s before we get to things like none of the new reconfigured classrooms have cabinets or countertops yet. Like, you can have a classroom without those things? But it’s a big pain in the ass.
Our band and orchestra rooms are not remotely functional yet; I’m not sure about the details because I haven’t seen them. But what I did see is that when they moved all of the stuff out of those rooms– and you can imagine just how much stuff is packed into your average middle school band and orchestra room– they Tetrised everything into one of our social studies classrooms. And I chose that word on purpose, because there is no room in her classroom. All of her desks are triple-stacked on top of each other against the wall farthest from the door. There was a narrow path to her desk, but you can’t do a whole damn lot to get ready in a classroom that is completely full of shit.
There are a bunch of teachers changing classrooms this year, too, and for a lot of them one of the two rooms isn’t ready yet, so none of them can go anywhere, and …
I wouldn’t be completely surprised if the middle schools have the start of school backed up by a couple of days, is what I’m saying. We can’t even do e-learning days, because none of the kids have their devices yet. We can find temporary workarounds for the classrooms– worst case, we have a lot of kids in the gym and in the library for the first few days of school, and it’s whatever; we’re annoyed but it’s manageable. But if there are any more delays to the bathrooms, we’ve got a major Goddamn problem on our hands.
There’s still the tiniest amount of work to be done– note the spot that needs to be patched and repainted next to the towel rack– but the bathroom is, at this point, nearly entirely finished, or at least close enough to post. That’s actually our vanity (those drawers are soft-touch, which I love) and our actual storage cabinet to make up for the fact that the shower ate a closet. Seriously, check the storage out:
There’s a lot of storage in there. I am pleased.
In other news, at approximately 5:05 PM this afternoon– which, remember, is a Friday– I got a call that my phone identified as “possibly” belonging to the guy who interviewed me a couple of weeks ago and then, as far as I could tell, ghosted me, since he said they’d be back with a decision over a week ago and they weren’t. I did not answer the call because I found myself suddenly not in the mood for it, and he …
… not only didn’t leave a message, but he didn’t email me either, which leaves me wondering exactly what the motivation for calling me at the end of the day on Friday. I don’t know if that’s a good news thing or a bad news thing, and I also don’t know what the reason for not leaving a message might be.
Either way, it’s not making me more interested in taking the job.
I’m not putting up a picture of my new shower door, which after many delays got put in today, because I am angry at it. I’m pretty sure the Goddamned thing got ordered incorrectly, because the piece of glass on the right, the one that doesn’t move, is fully an inch higher than the one on the left that is the actual door. Everything appears to have been installed correctly; the guy who did the work visibly winced as soon as I noticed the height differential, and I’m pretty sure that “uneven” isn’t a style. It already took, what, four months extra to get this thing in place?
Oh, and the vanity was definitely sent to us in the wrong size. This is the second vanity, mind you; the first one arrived crushed. This one was six inches bigger than it was supposed to be and doesn’t fit in the space we have for it.
And since we don’t have the right vanity, we’re still using the loaner they gave us, which means they had to remove the cabinet, which they put in first, because the loaner vanity and the cabinet don’t play nice with each other, so for a while today I had my nice new bathroom cabinet in place and now I don’t have it anymore.
