TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Drywall Edition

On December 22, 2021 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.

In which I lack skills

On September 5, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

I’ve been in this weird place for a couple of weeks– months? Hell, who knows, time has no meaning– where I want to get into woodworking. You may have seen the turning videos I’ve posted. That’s what people in the know call it, you see.

I’m not going to get into woodworking. I have nowhere to work wood, no tools for woodworking, and no one to instruct me in woodworkery, and I suspect this is not really something that one teaches oneself from videos on the internet. I have also considered getting into spin painting recently. You may recall a Teach Myself to Draw project a couple of years (?) ago if you’ve been around a while; that fizzled when I realized that while I did want to be good at drawing things, there wasn’t any particular thing I wanted to draw, and that’s … kind of important?

That ukulele is still around, too. Never gonna learn to play it. (I am, and I swear this is a coincidence, listening to Eddie Vedder’s ukulele album right now.)

What creative thing would you be good at if you actually wanted to put in the effort to get there?

I might be dead

On March 22, 2017March 22, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

This came up when I Googled “dado joint.” I have no idea.

Sitting very near to me is a pile of paper, about an inch high, that I will need to absorb to some as-yet unclear degree in order to pass an examination on Friday. The test is going to take two fucking hours, and right now I have not the slightest idea what they think is going to take that long. I am and always have been a fast test-taker, so I expect this to take no more than twenty minutes. In theory, I ought to be studying at the moment.

I’m going to save it for tomorrow. I haven’t had a good old-fashioned cramming session in a few years. We’ll see if I’m still any good at it.

A shocking admission: despite my exhaustion, this has been a worthwhile trip, and there is nothing happening tomorrow that makes me think it’s likely that I’ll change my mind. As a lifelong educator the notion that professional development and/or training might not be personally insulting, much less actually useful, is almost unprecedented. Meeting with vendors is great. Granted, they’re all salesmen too and thus hucksters to some degree or another, but I’m actually learning shit.

Oh, and there’s HGTV on the hotel room TV, so you know how I’m really spending my evenings, right?

Also, people who live nearby are posting on Facebook that the local weather services are muttering about a foot of snow on Friday. If the world suddenly ends you know why. Good luck, thanks for all the fish, and all that.

In which I reveal facts

On July 1, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work2 Comments

576c36a3a6f2a.image.jpg Ah, screw it. Furniture. I sell furniture now. Maybe that was obvious from the thing about the massage chair the other day; I dunno. There are not a ton of furniture stores in the area but there are at least as many furniture stores as there are middle schools, and I’ve made it three years without anyone trying to dox me, so screw it. I suspect talking about my life for the next little while will become very complicated if I’m not even able to reveal what sort of sales I’m involved in.

That said, the training wheels come off on Monday, so if you know me and you’re in the area and in the market for some furniture, come hit me up. Believe it or not the Fourth of July weekend will feature a sale. I suspect that detail will not help people pin down what store I work at. I have spent the week in a crazily intense crash course on basically everything anyone could possibly want to know about furniture, and I am trying hard to resist the urge to tear apart everything in the house to see how it is constructed. I have learned more about drawer construction in the last four days than I ever imagined it was possible to know. Drawers are complicated! Really damn complicated! I can tell you about like four different types of dovetailing and on Monday I didn’t know what dovetailing was. And lacquer! Do you know what catalyzed lacquer is? Because I do. Go ahead, point at a piece of wood on a piece of furniture and ask me if it’s solid wood or veneered. I’ll know.

Also, I really want all-new furniture. Like, everywhere in the house. I expect to spend my first four to six paychecks entirely on furniture. My wife may have something to say about this, I suppose. On a couple of different levels.

So that’s what I’ve been doing all week. I’m at OtherJob tomorrow, then I have Sunday off, and I work on Monday and on my birthday. Will there be celebrations after that?

I’m turning 40. Probably.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: PHASE 2 COMPLETE

On August 2, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

We hadn’t stopped working; I just decided a few days ago that I wasn’t doing any more updates until shit looked good.

Shit looks good.

Another look at the shower tile (finished over winter break) and the new toilet. The new toilet is wonderful. If you shit God, God will be flushed. As a fat man, I appreciate this. The new toilet is not leaking. Did I ever show you the new floor tile? That’s not leaking either, but tile generally doesn’t do that.

The new vanity and countertop. This… is a bit more of a problem. Everything you can see is not leaking, is hooked up, and works beautifully. Note that I also put new floor trim in, although you can’t see it too well. It’s just trim; trim’s not actually terribly impressive. But it’s there!

Closeup of the countertop and the new faucet. I love this countertop a LOT. I’m also glad that the vanity is taller than the old one, because it means that the boy’s going to have to grow a bit before he’s tall enough to splash water out of the sink, and hopefully by then he’ll be less likely to wantonly splash stuff around. Yes, the distance from the faucet to the electrical outlet is within code; yes, I’m also putting safety stops into the outlets when they’re not being used.

This shit right here is not my fault. And it’s leaking. (And it’s better than it looks, because that one PVC join that is obviously crooked is not crooked any longer.) The supply lines to the faucet are working beautifully and appear to be watertight; the rest of it, not so much.

Basically it’s leaking at the one spot that is obviously bad, which does not surprise me, as joining those two pipes in that fashion was basically a kludge involving crossed fingers. The PVC-galvanized join is strong and so is the join where the trap joins with the pipe coming out of the wall. I need to talk to some folks who know better than me and come up with something better than the kludge. I also need to fix a new leak that popped up by the drain that wasn’t there originally, because in all the screwing around with the pipes I accidentally loosened the top (blue) pipe too much and now it’s leaking too.

I will wait a few days, do some research and some thinking, and then take another shot at this, and if I can’t get it right the second time I’ll just suck it up and call a plumber. I’m not actually upset about this; it’s leaking at a spot that I knew was dodgy and it’s not leaking enough that it renders the sink unusable. If I need to wash my hands or my face in that sink, it’ll be fine; the pot underneath will catch the small amount of water that comes out. I just want it perfect.

Later this week, we’ll get into what Phase 3 entails. Phase 3 is the final phase.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The end is nigh

On July 26, 2015July 26, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

We’ve laid every tile we can lay without standing on any of them. I’d prefer to have the job done today, but not at the expense of doing it right.

Almost there, kids.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Hell Yeah edition

On July 25, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

Quite a lot accomplished in the last 24 hours or so.
That is the bathroom floor covered in horrid blue glue and Tavy Thin Skin, which is a product I’d never heard of a week ago designed to make it easy to tile over vinyl. I spent a fair amount of time Googling and searching around and discovered that, while I found a lot of contractor types who hadn’t used it going “Man, I don’t see how that will work well,” I couldn’t find anyone who had used it and had bad results from their floor. The biggest complaints were about spreading the glue and that was something I felt like I could deal with. We did not get to the skimcoat yesterday, but we did do it this morning:

So. Nice clean layer of thinset laid down; tomorrow we tile. That is probably going to extend into Monday but I’m hoping we can get it done in a day; it’ll depend on how easy it is to cut around the toilet and the floor register and to deal with the two rows where we basically just have to re-cut the rectangle on the tile.

A day after the tile is set, grout.

A day after the grout, the sink and the toilet (at least the toilet; I’m predicting complications with the sink) goes back in, along with the door, and we are set, son. At least until we decide what to do with the electrical. The lamps are still going to be in the wrong place, and we won’t be putting the mirror up until we decide where to put lighting. But basically everything below the waist will be finished.

Also completed today and yesterday: Cut the trim around the door so that the tile could go under it, trimmed the door itself by half an inch, then yanked a door from our other bathroom and trimmed it by half an inch. That door in particular has been a huge problem since we got the house; at some point some water got between the vinyl and the subfloor in there and bubbled the tile up, and the door’s been extremely difficult to open and close, to the point where we rarely use it.

No longer. Fixed as hell. We’ve both been just opening and closing it for the hell of it.

Also fixed: every folding closet door in the house, damn near all of which were off their tracks. I’m kicking myself for this one; turns out these are extremely easy to fix, it’s just not immediately obvious how to do it.

Important detail: not a bit of this project (and by “project,” I’m extending all the way back to the very beginning) would have been possible without the internet. We would have made so many mistakes. I love being able to look shit up and find videos on how to do stuff any time I need it.

And now I shall go to my other job, and endeavor not to fall asleep behind my counter.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Friday

On July 24, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Basically took yesterday off from bathroom stuff because of the carpet/tile people coming in to clean; clearing the living room and dining room of anything we could carry counted as work enough, and I spent the day in here working on Searching for Malumba.

I will be satisfied with myself if, by the end of the day, I have: