Tag: bathrooms

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Almost there

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Substantial progress in the last couple of days:

A good look at the flooring, which is completely installed, and the wall color, which is a light grey. I love how this turned out. Love it.

This is the shower, which gets tiled tomorrow, and the fan/lighting sconce overhead. Nice and simple.

The niche and the bench. We’re using a different shelf than the one that’s sitting in there; it’s got holes in it for drainage and is considerably thinner.

The hardwood in the bedroom is a freaking mess, but I love that the transition pieces match the flooring. I don’t know if I should have expected this but I love it as a little detail.

And the first parts of the tile are in! This literally just happened; it was the last of the work for today as this needs to set before they can tile the rest of the shower tomorrow. The wall tiles will be a lot bigger, with an accent stripe going underneath all the shower hardware and more accent tile inside the niche. The grout here will be black; we were going to go with black everywhere but the tile guy thinks it has a good chance of bleeding into the accent tile, which is more the color of the floor, so we might go with white there.

The rest of the shower gets tiled tomorrow, and then all that’s left is trim, the toilet and bidet, the vanity, the closet, the hangers and shelving, grout, and finishing up the last details on the electric. Oh, and the shower door. That’s kind of important. I think they’re planning on working through the weekend, so we should be done Tuesday or Wednesday. I cannot wait to see what the shower looks like.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Drywall Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Walls! A ceiling! Relatively boring pictures!

There’s no light in the room any more other than the spots they’ve got set up, but you get the idea. Drywall!

The shower walls are up too, and man, does it look enormous. My wife’s idea to eat the closet was absolutely the right call. There’s still going to be a bench going in here on the right side, but even once that’s in place there’s still a ton more room.

And the most important arrival of the day: the bidet is here! It’s still in a box. I could show you a picture of the box, but it’s just a cardboard shipping box. Not super exciting.

I don’t know if they’re working tomorrow yet– one guy is still here, doing something up in the attic, so I’ll ask him before he leaves– so there may not be any updates until after Christmas. If they do more tomorrow, I’ll update again, of course.

And Now: The Continuation of TERRIBLE DECISIONS

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Compared to the staggering changes yesterday, when the whole bathroom got torn down to the studs, the progression today doesn’t seem too extensive, but they basically got a ton of stuff done that involved precise measuring and cutting. I didn’t get pictures of everything, because junction boxes and power switches and GCFI outlets aren’t really all that interesting, but here’s the shower:

The new back wall, formerly the closet, is properly studded out now and the niche is in place, along with the curb and the shower drain. The little extra bit in the niche is the middle shelf and just isn’t in place yet. This also involved a fair amount of fuckery in our utterly unacceptable crawlspace so it was a hell of a job. The last bits of tile on the floor from the flooring before the linoleum we had are also gone. There’s also a ton of new studding in other places where they wanted to augment the preexisting wood a bit. Here’s the other side of the shower:

The copper pipes at the very bottom are preexisting; the PEX pipe, the fittings, and the shower hardware are all, obviously, new.

Tomorrow, the electrical gets finished up, the rest of the shower hardware goes in place, and they’ll start putting up drywall. We’ve been told that this is the last night that we’ll have a freezing cold bedroom, which honestly is disappointing, because last night might have been the best night of sleep of my entire fucking life. There’s nothing I love more than sleeping in a cold bedroom.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The Destructioning

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am in a hurry, as something that I thought was at 6:30 is at 6:00 and I need to buy a card and a gift between now and then, so have some pictures, which I don’t think need a whole lot of context anyway:

What was behind the weird patched part of the wall? An unused junction box!

Broken tile!

Broken all sorts of stuff!

They were not prepared for the amount of insulation we have in the attic. Apparently this was “chest-deep” a few minutes before I went to investigate all the coughing. Sorry about the lung cancer, guys.

You can get an idea of how deep the blown-in was from this picture. We’ll have to reinsulate once the new ceiling goes in, but that’s the biggest problem we’ve encountered so far.

You can see from the dots on the wall (paint, sprayed through the pegboard) where the old closet was. The new shower is going to be nice.

Probably no pictures tomorrow, as they’re just doing electrical and some plumbing, but we’ll see.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The Return

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

…we never really finished the first bathroom renovation, so to hell with it, let’s start on the second one. Only we’ve hired professionals to do it this time! And demo starts tomorrow! Let’s take a look at what we’re wrecking:

Bek and I removed the giant mirror that was on the wall in front of the heinous green wallpaper, because that’s going to go into the basement, but I think you can manage to imagine a mirror. That patch of unwallpapered wall next to the medicine cabinet was there when we moved in (did they move the medicine cabinet over a couple feet? Replace it? We’ll never know); the torn patch of wallpaper next to it was me, trying to figure out what was behind it (and deciding it was way too much of a pain in the ass to remove). The holes in the wall were made tonight, just for the hell of it. All of this is gone tomorrow. All of it.

This closet is actually in our bedroom, and it’s not going to be a closet anymore as of tomorrow. We are eating this space to expand the shower …

…because this is the existing shower, and there’s been a leak in it somewhere since we moved in, so it literally hasn’t been used in years. This is going to get much bigger and have a bench, a rainfall shower head and a regular one, and a few other bits of coolness. But the kicker? The thing I’m looking forward to the most about this entire process? My wife let me order this tonight.

Yep. That’s right, motherfuckers: I just spent over a thousand dollars on a bidet. It has a remote control.

My asshole is going to be immaculate.

Start looking forward to the review right now. Because there is going to be a review.

I have to get up early tomorrow so that I’m ready for the construction guys, and I don’t even mind.

May as well tell everyone

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

I came as close as I’ve come in my adult life to shitting myself in public today.

Yeah, buckle up, buttercup, it’s gonna be one of those kinds of posts.

Y’all have been here a while: what do you think is my least favorite thing about teaching? Is it paperwork? Lesson planning? Grading? Discipline? Dealing with students who don’t want to be there and don’t intend to allow anyone else to get an education but still manifestly refuse to stay the fuck home like they ought to?

Nah. It’s the fact that I can’t go take a shit when I need to.

Every so often someone will get pissy (no pun intended) with me about the idea that kids need permission from teachers to go to the bathroom. Without wading into that conversation too deeply, I write a lot of bathroom passes during the day, and basically my only rule about it is that it’s not happening if 1) I’m actively teaching, 2) You seem to be more interested in fucking around in the halls than taking a piss, or 3) I can’t actually think of a third reason but these things don’t work well in binaries. Even then, I’m likely to let you go anyway if you look like you really need to go.

But what about girls and their peeeeeeerioooooods, the nonsense-speakers shriek.

I can assure you that after eighteen years of teaching girls at or around the age of menarche I have encountered every period-related problem that it is possible for a male teacher to encounter and I’ve got the shit covered. Your kid still can’t get up and go to the bathroom whenever they want, because inevitably the exact same people who think their precious babies should be able to leave my room whenever the mood strikes them also would be excessively angry if they ever attempted to collect their child from school and the teacher’s response was “I have no idea where this kid is.”

Anyway.

The point is, as restrictive or liberal as any teacher might be about their personal bathroom policies, a simple fact remains: while at least in theory we can let a kid out to go use the bathroom whenever we want, unless we happen to have another adult in the room with us, which is much rarer than it should be, we can never go use the bathroom, because we can’t leave our students alone. And I’mma be blunt here: I don’t drink coffee in the morning any longer because coffee has certain specific effects on me that I don’t have time for in the morning, and if I don’t have an adult in the room with me during 5th and 6th hour, which are the two class periods after lunch, there is going to be a problem, because I can’t make it an hour and a Goddamn half after lunch without a bathroom break.

I normally have a paraprofessional in the room with me, but the science teacher was out today and he was covering her class. Her practice is generally to bring her whole class out for the last couple minutes of the period for– you guessed it– a bathroom break, and I was so close to a disaster that I walked out into the hallway and told him he was just going to have to find a way to watch that room (it’s next door) and mine for the next couple of minutes and bolted for the bathroom.

The boys’ bathroom is directly across the hall from my room. And I have proven today that I will not use the kids’ bathroom under any circumstances, because if I didn’t use it today, I’m never using it.

There are two adult bathrooms that I am legally able to use on my floor. Both have one toilet. If the one I’d gone to had been occupied, I’d have been fucked.

I will spare you the details. Let’s just say that the tolerances were milliseconds and centimeters, respectively, and that I didn’t have to clean anything up afterwards that I don’t normally have to clean up.

And that is my least favorite thing about teaching.

Nattering on

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I’m in a mood again today, and I think it’s social media related; I need to spend less time on … well, everything, really. I’ve done a reasonable amount of adulting today; I rescheduled a doctor’s appointment, made my first dentist’s appointment since before the pandemic (letting people stick their fingers in my mouth before I was vaccinated was not happening) and got some more planning done for next year. I also finished my first bookbinding project, which I was going to share with you but I think I’ll wait until I finish the second one instead. All I can see when I look at this one are the mistakes, so I’m going to give it to my son and make a better one for my wife, which hopefully will be something I’m actually willing to share with people.

You’d think this would have me in a decent headspace, but I just can’t deal with the level of stupid the world is throwing at me today:

I also sat down with the estimate I just got from the fixtures place for our bathroom renovation, and compared it to our initial estimate, which was supposedly based on average prices at that specific location, and I’m going to have to have a stern word with someone about it, because right now we are astronomically over budget, before a single square inch of drywall gets pulled off the wall or a single tile gets laid. To a certain degree I’m willing to blame myself for not paying attention to certain things– like the fact that a shower door wasn’t included in the original estimate, when in fact what I was told was a very basic shower door at this place is thirteen hundred dollars, and a shower door is not exactly an unexpected purchase when redoing a bathroom. But when you tell us that your estimate for the vanity will cover a “custom” vanity for the space, and we in fact pick out a pre-built, non custom vanity, and the vanity still runs three times the estimate? That’s on you. When we are specific across the board that we are looking for mid-range stuff, and we ask you to quote us out for mid-range stuff, and then they show us what they are saying is mid-range stuff, and the estimate is off two hundred percent? I am not taking all the blame for that shit.

So first I have to go over all this with my wife to figure out just how deep in the shit we are, and how much we can afford to crawl out of said shit, and then I need to call my guy who put this estimate together and we’re gonna have us a come to Jesus moment.

So, yeah. I’m in a mood.

Lights!

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

This is as exciting as my day got– picking out the lighting for the bathroom remodel. That’s what they look like; bask in its room-lighty glory. Or not; we didn’t exactly go super-complicated on this particular decision. I suppose we also picked out a bathroom exhaust fan, but seeing as how the entire decision-making process for that was to authorize whatever our contractor had already suggested, and I couldn’t pick the one we chose out of a lineup if my life depended on it, it didn’t count for much.

My criteria for the lights: 1) brushed nickel, to match everything else in the room; 2) smoked glass so that I’m not staring at bare lightbulbs, and 3) facing downwards to make the bulbs easier to change. My wife argued with none of these determinations and I more or less went “Okay, whatever you want” beyond that. I think we’ve been surprising the people at these places with how quickly and easily we’ve been able to make decisions throughout this process, although I did horrify the saleslady at the fixtures place a couple of weeks ago by abruptly snarling at my wife about something or another; Bek knew exactly what I was doing and laughed about it, but the saleslady clearly thought I had decided to die on the hill of refusing to have oval-shaped pulls on the vanity or whatever it was that I’d complained about, and you could see her bracing herself to be an unwitting bystander in Marital Drama.

I suspect these people probably have a touch of PTSD, and I don’t blame them for it; we probably ought to just get along in public and not make jokes. I will do better in the future.

There’s not much more to report here, really; I planned for the first couple of days of summer break to be low-activity and I’ve successfully achieved that. Tomorrow we are heading to Illinois to finally meet my new nephew, so expect a hotel window picture tomorrow evening and maybe some baby pictures if my brother and sister-in-law will allow it. Maybe I’ll just put my hand over his face and post that; we’ll see. We’ll stay overnight– the boy is psyched about staying in a hotel for the first time in forever– and be back Sunday, and then Monday morning I start actually Preparing for Things. We’ll see how well I do.