Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com
The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I’ve got a job for y’all.
Go here. I don’t care if you’re trans or cis. I’m cisgendered and I’m doing it so you should too.
Purchase some stickers. Once they show up, leave them in your car.
And every time you walk into a business, until your stickers are gone, go to the bathroom at that business and spread chaos.
I gotta find an excuse to take a piss in a church.
(Also, the bathrooms at my local Lowe’s, which was my first target, are surprisingly clean and pleasant.)
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.
I’m fucking tired.
I find myself in the incredibly odd position of needing to take some time tonight to read the owner’s manual for my new toilet and– wait for it– program the remote control. That is a true sentence.
That is because the lid to the toilet there is actually a bidet— if you look closely you’ll see the power icons and such on the back of the seat– and I have no idea how to make it work. I fiddled with the remote and was unable to get it to spray any water at me so we’ll have to see what finagling is necessary to get it working.
The rest of the bathroom is kind of interesting. There are a number of pieces we don’t have yet. You see a corner of the vanity in that picture; that’s not our vanity, which arrived with some significant damage, so they gave us a loaner. As a former furniture salesman who is aware that furniture is made of wood, I’m not pressed about it. The cabinet isn’t in just yet, and since we don’t have the actual vanity, we’re holding off on installing the mirror until we can center it properly. The doors and all the various hanger-things go on (or back on) tomorrow. The actual shower door needed to wait for precise measurements once the tile was in, so that’s still a couple of weeks out; we’ll make do with a tension rod and a curtain until then, which is fine. And speaking of the shower:
That’s our actual shower head, but (again) we have some loaner pieces– if you look at the actual pipe coming out of the wall and the ring on it, they’re both chrome as opposed to the brushed nickel we have everywhere else. That’s also waiting on backordered stuff and they’ll swap it out once we get the right pieces. The two little holes on the right are for the (again, no shit) remote for the shower head, which is too high for my wife to reach easily; the remote was a BIG selling point for her. I’m not even going to show the vanity, as again, it’s the wrong one, but here’s the (correct) lighting sconce:
I should probably crop that, but whatever.
More tomorrow, once the rest of the bits and bobs go in, and then we’re going to be done for a while until the “real” pieces show up.
…before you read this post, I’d like you to read this one. You’ll be casting yourselves almost exactly eight years into the past. You will note that the post involves renovating a bathroom. I don’t know if there are any of you still reading this blog who were here way back then, when we decided to renovate the hallway bathroom and to do it ourselves. All of the recent Terrible Decisions posts have been regarding the master bathroom, and of course we have hired other people to do all of the work.
You will note that that post involves installing the ceiling fan, and that I mention bringing my general contractor father-in-law in to do the job because I was convinced that at some point during the process I would put my foot in the wrong place and either break myself or bust a hole in the ceiling.
At some point after finishing that installation– you can see it there, and it looks nice and clean, and I have other pictures from around then that show the outer cover of the fan put in place, too– my father-in-law, who I love dearly, put his fucking foot in the wrong place and busted a hole in the ceiling.
Amazingly, I never appear to have posted about it, possibly out of a desire to not be seen as making fun of somebody who was genuinely trying to help us out. Even more amazingly, I don’t have a picture of the busted-ass broke-ass held-in-place-by-cement-board-tape bullshit that has been sitting next to my ceiling fan for eight fucking years and, ultimately, halted all work on the Goddamned bathroom because we weren’t sure what to do with it between the metal joists in the ceiling, the plaster getting in the way of a clean repair, a couple of other things, and the sort of inertia that can set in on home improvement projects where eventually you hit “eh, good enough,” and because you live with it you learn to ignore the fucking ridiculousness.
(I really don’t want to be writing this post, if I’m being honest, because I’m so ashamed of this nonsense. I am genuinely hoping that I can say “you know how it is,” and that many of you will, in fact, Know how It Is.)
I swear to you that at the beginning of every single break from school and honestly at least a third of the weekends since late December of 2013, I have looked at that fucking hole and sworn to myself that this time, this time, this would be the weekend or the break where I finally fixed that motherfucking hole.
And … well, let’s say it’s half done:
The actual hole was in the place where all the plaster is broken, and it was still holding in place on the left side where the marker is and just sort of out of place out toward the back where it’s obviously been cut. I thought I had a picture of the actual mess itself (my wife probably does but she’s not home) but somehow, again, I never took one. And after eight years of waiting and no more than an hour of actual work:
It’s not perfect but it’s a shitton better, and once there’s tape and mud on it it’ll be fine. I’m not taping and mudding today. I probably should push through and get it done but it’s already 5:00 somehow and I have shit to do tonight. I have the mud already, though, so I can get it done this week.
Frankly if I get it done before 2030 at this point I think I can say I was on the ball.
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