Tag: carpentry

Terrible Decisions, Stage Three

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

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What I have learned about myself today:  sometimes, when I’m trying to measure something, even if I’m being careful, I can somehow suddenly end up being off by two entire inches for no clear reason at all, and then can add 3 to 56, get 59, but get off another inch as I’m trying to measure those three inches.  I’m not sure how these things happen.  It’s possible that I’m dumb!  But if I’m dumb I’m at least dumb enough that I caught it and fixed it (pay attention to black, not orange) before it mattered to anyone.

Note that “before it mattered to anyone” technically means “ever,” since those walls that I’ve written on are getting torn down and then an actual professional is doing the tiling.  But it occurred to us that we ought probably to have a real idea of how we were going to put the tile on the wall before we start paying some dude to come over and do it for us– since, again, I cannot be trusted.  

The actual tiles are at the bottom of the post.  We’re using the white glossy ceramic with the greyish-blue marbling as the main shower tile, and it’s going almost all the way up the wall, to where you can see the little black line with the arrows on it– or, possibly, a bit above that, if we add a row of narrower beveled tiles above the bigger ones.  The actual tiles are the same style as the one in the picture but are 10″ x 14″.  We’ll probably put a row of those smaller ones on the outside row just to make it look less abrupt– much like the current tub does.

The bulkhead you see there is going to be gone, and we’re putting in a new ceiling fan powered by the tears of children.  We’re not planning on tiling the shower ceiling; that’ll all be paint, although we haven’t settled on a color yet.  Still working on that.

The black line with the wavy bit in it is going to be accent tile– the glass tile you see down below, cut into four rows so that each section of tile actually gets us four feet of the accent row.  We may or may not use more of it as a little backsplash between the vanity and the mirror; we haven’t gotten that far yet and aren’t sure how it’ll look in the end.  The third, darker tile is the floor– we bailed on the cork idea once we determined that we absolutely had no choice but to retile the shower surround; if we’re paying a professional to come in anyway we may as well lay tile on the floor.  I still like the cork idea but this is less risky.  The orange wavy parts are slightly-mismeasured other ideas about where to put the accent row; I think the black is the actual final decision, although it’ll end up being off by a tiny bit since I didn’t bother to account for 1/8 of an inch or so of grout between each of the tiles.  It’s slightly above my eye level, which is about where I wanted it, and is high enough that it’s unlikely that it’s going to get a lot of water splashed on it (since this’ll be a high-grout area) which was what my lovely wife wanted.  Plus at that height we don’t have to have any of the bigger tiles cut to put it there– it’ll slide in nicely between, if I remember right, the third and fourth row.

I may push for floor heating, since the actual floor space in the room is so small I can’t imagine it’ll cost much.  Don’t tell my wife yet.(*)

(Oh, hey, wait!  I looked it up and it’s not that expensive for a small area. Hmm.)

At any rate, the next step is to wait for Installer Dude to come by and measure everything for reals, which is happening… tomorrow, I think?  And then we actually buy all the tile and break a bunch of shit and possibly need a plumber for behind the wall (I’m crossing my fingers that this doesn’t happen) and then do some cement boarding and then bring him back to actually do the tiling work.  Or maybe we do that even before we schedule him to come back; I dunno, but we decided that we weren’t breaking anything until he’d measured and we had a sense of what sort of lead time they needed to schedule the job.

I’m looking forward to the “breaking stuff” phase.  We were gonna do that this weekend but ended up deciding it was stupid timing.  No use destroying the bathroom before it’s necessary, right?  Sure.

Enjoy what’s left of your Labor Day weekend, folks.  And thank a union member for making sure you have days off at all.  Or, better yet, become one.

(*) Of course she reads this.  You still don’t get to tell her.

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In which I bullet point

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

ostriches-head-in-sandJust  a couple of things that are rolling around in my head; do with them what you will:

  • President Obama did the right thing– politically, morally, and legally– by going to Congress for authorization to attack Syria.  I have no idea whether he’ll get it, but this thing where we just attack other countries without a declaration of war because the President wants to needs to stop.  That said, the AUMF is probably too broad, and for it to matter Obama’s going to have to pay attention to what Congress says to do, which he doesn’t actually have to.
  • Congress should say no, and Obama shouldn’t have wanted to do this in the first place.  Not one more thin fucking dime for bombs in the Middle East; I don’t give a shit what they do to each other anymore.  Chemical weapons, machine guns, eat each fucking other for all I care.  No more goddamn Middle East wars.  There’s no good outcome from this under any circumstances– we take out Assad and bring democracy to Syria, they’re just going to elect an Islamist government– so we shouldn’t do anything at all.  Let them solve their own goddamn civil war.
  • Humanitarians are no doubt thinking humanitarian things based on that last paragraph.  I initially supported the Iraq war on humanitarian grounds; look at where that got us.  “Fuck it” is now officially a position on war.  If that makes me a bad person, I can live with it; if that means tinhorn despots will continue to use chemical weapons to ineffectively kill relatively small numbers of people I can live with that too.
  • NICE OF YOU TO SAY “FUCK IT” WHILE PEOPLE ARE DYING, ASSHOLE:  Refer to “no good outcome” response.  Nothing we can do about this.  Bombing just kills more innocent people.  I’d prefer we not do that, and since there’s no viable positive outcome that means we don’t do it.
  • I was already aware of most of the information in this useful article except for the bit where we’re pissing Russia off, which seems like another reason for this to be a nay-nay war, as John Pinette might say.
  • Notre Dame’s first home game was yesterday, which meant we got our first onslaught of poorly-housebroken drunk asshole fucks after the game, two of whom were wearing shirts that said “SOUTH BEND FUCKIN’ INDIANA” on the front and something along the lines of “IF YOU DON’T BLEED BLUE AND GOLD TAKE YOUR BITCH ASS HOME” on the back, displaying the kind of grace and class I’ve come to expect from Notre Dame students over the years.  I considered throwing them out on the spot and settled for making them turn the shirts inside out, then managed to get into a minor Twitter fight this morning while making sure I’d gotten the back of the shirts right.
  • No demolition today in the bathroom; we’ve decided to wait until measuring is done and we have a timeline on the guy coming in to do the tile.  There’s no point in wrecking the bathroom early– possibly a couple of weeks early– when there’s so much else to be done before we can put it back together, even if a three-day weekend would be convenient.
  • Here’s the front of the shirt.
  • It’s probably time to potty train the boy.  There have been Constipation Issues this week.  I don’t like knowing about other people’s poops.
  • Making snow pea beef stir fry tonight.  I am hugely looking forward to it.
  • Looking less forward to having to wade through four inches of grading HOW THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN ALREADY.

Might add more later.  Whee!

On extracurriculars

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I am at a middle school football game. It is a hundred million degrees and I am wearing work clothes, including my lanyard, and I am anticipating a massive scalp/neck sunburn because there is no shade anywhere.

Ah, teaching.

Later, I will hunt for tile.

We appear to have lost, which is sad– I had to leave early for the tilening, which didn’t even work out to much– we weren’t able to find what I had declared the Perfect Tile at our Lowe’s when we went to the Lowe’s that is closer to my parents’ place, although we did manage to make an appointment for a guy to come out and measure our bathroom and tell me how deep the buggery going to be once they come over and tile for us.  (We have discussed it.  We are not tiling ourselves.  The reason:  we don’t wanna.)   The demolition is still scheduled for this weekend and I’m still not exactly sure how that’s going to go.  But I’m looking forward to blogging about how wrong it went.

Terrible Decisions, Stage Two

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

photoWe started off so well. If you’ve noticed my Instagram feed over there, there’s a picture of a bunch of boxes containing my new toilet, my new tub, and my new tub surround. We’d gotten a bunch of flooring samples from a place online and had narrowed our flooring choices down to two possibilities, one light and one dark. We’d found a vanity or two we liked, and a store that would let us custom-design basically whatever the hell we wanted without blowing our budget up too goddamn much.

Then my father-in-law came over. You remember my father-in-law the general contractor, right? The guy who gave my brother a heart attack when, ten seconds after arriving at the Great Redeckening, he pronounced our wood incorrect?

Yeah. That guy.

“That tub’s not going to work,” he says. Which means the surround isn’t going to work. And I am now very angry– not at him, because he’s right, and more importantly he’s right well before we started destroying our tub or taking things out of boxes and he’s right while we can still take stuff back. I’m angry because I shoulda noticed this shit on my own and I didn’t.

60 inches is basically standard for a tub nowadays, right? I had measured our tub and it had come out to 58 inches from tile to tile– which, I reasoned, given that there was a layer of tile and, underneath that, a layer of drywall, meant that there was certainly going to be sixty inches from stud to stud. The new surround attaches directly to the studs, so all of that stuff was going to come out and then the tub would fit.

Take a real close look at that picture there and see if you can figure out what’s wrong. Go ahead; I’ll wait. No, not the rotten drywall and the mold. We knew about that already; that’s the problem we were going to fix with the new tub and new surround. We discovered the leak when the wallpaper back there started turning black– it’s close to the floor in between the tub and the toilet, though, so it was easy to ignore. Then the drywall started disintegrating. I ripped some of it out to try and figure out how bad it was; it’s actually not very moldy– the black is all on the surface and the wood itself is still, mostly, solid. The white thing on the left is a guard that we put in that (I thought at the time) would stop the leak– I thought water was just running along the edge of the tub and hitting the drywall. No, as it turns out, it’s behind the tile, as we discovered when we pulled one of the tiles out and ran some water. The leak’s not in the tub at all.

But forget about that. Look at the tub, and then look at the wall stud above it. See a problem?

The tub extends a good inch underneath the studs. These fuckers who built this house put the tub in before they even studded the wall, and then built a bloody header over the top of the thing. Which means that any sixty inch tub that expects to have a surround around it is going to be wider than the bathroom is. It’s impossible to put any other modern sixty inch tub in there without moving fucking walls around, and that’s not a level of work that we’re willing to commit to at this time.

My father-in-law figured all this out at a glance.

We have to keep the tub, but we’re still going to have to rip out the tile. There was a brief flirtation with 54″ tubs, but after looking around a bit we decided against that idea on account of they’re all crap. What we’re going to have to do is pull out all the existing tile, pull out all the drywall behind it (which is going to be mostly rotten and moldy at this point anyway), then redrywall (hopefully with a thinner board than they’re using) and retile over that. Tiling is beyond my skill level, so we’ll have to hire someone for it, which is probably gonna blow up our budget– although we’ll make a tiny bit of it back by not having to buy a new tub, I doubt we’ll get anybody to come out and do the new tile work for less than the tub would have cost– although I’ll admit I haven’t really looked into it much so maybe I’ll get lucky.

Also, so much for getting all this done by next weekend. Don’t think so. Sigh.

Now that it’s over…

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Dolphin-Sunset-HD-WallpaperLet’s talk about how the summer went.

In a word? Weird.

As I write this (which isn’t at 8:00 on Wednesday morning, which is when this is going to pop; I’m probably passing out locker numbers to my homeroom girls right now) I still don’t have ISTEP scores for the 2012-13 school year. We can argue– and I have, no link necessary– about how important these tests should be, and how much they actually accurately measure student learning, but the simple fact is that they’re really really important right now even if they should be. In a very real way, I’ve spent all summer unable to close the book on 2012-13 because I never got my ISTEP scores. I have kids who have already transferred or moved who I’m never going to get to be able to tell that they passed for the first time, or that they brought their scores up by more than they ever have before.

That’s kind of a big deal for me. Now, granted, I’ve got a lot of these kids back, so I can have the conversation with them this year, but it’s not the same. Psychologically, I haven’t let go of last year yet. I haven’t been able to process how well they/I did– for better or for worse– and figure out a way to adjust and/or do things better for this year, because I don’t yet know how well the changes I made last year worked out. And that’s a damn weird position to be in. (I’m hoping that by the time this actually publishes I’ll actually have scores in-hand, but I’m not holding my breath.)

Outside of school… well, it was still a weird summer. It started off too wet, transitioned into too hot– expected in northern Indiana in July– but then took a weird detour straight into Octobersville, which is where we’ve lived for the last month or so. Business at OtherJob hasn’t been what I’ve wanted it to be, because the weather never cooperated with us. And it’s made the job less fun in a way that I don’t like at all, because having something fun to get paid for is the whole point of OtherJob. I don’t like it when that doesn’t happen.

I built a deck. That was awesome. I cooked a bunch of stuff; also awesome. Ripped up some carpeting in my hallway and started working on the year’s biggest project, the new bathroom, which I’m hoping will be awesome once it’s done.

I failed at ukulele. That was unfortunate.

And then there was this place. I haven’t been a regular blogger for several years, and I managed to write damn near every day through the summer (when the hell did I start this place up again? Early June?) regardless of what else was going on. I think I only missed two or three days all summer, and while the posts haven’t exactly all been brilliant at least I’ve been writing. I’m hoping to hell I can keep up at least a four- or five-days-a-week pace once school starts; we’ll see. Weirdly, I think my schedule– my prep period is last hour– might help with that; it’ll give me time to get stuff done before school lets out, which will mean I won’t be at school as long, which will mean I’ll theoretically have time at home to write. I don’t want this place to wither, but I can’t pretend there’s not a real risk of it. The plan will be to always try and write for the next day so I can keep posts popping in the morning. We’ll see.

The biggest failure of the summer has been where it always is: writing fiction, which I’ve barely done at all. Which I never do, despite my constant desire to the contrary. But you’ve seen that rant before, multiple times, so I’ll spare you.

And that was that. Here we go again.

Terrible Decisions, Stage One

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

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Today, we start work (well, sorta) on our next home improvement project: destroying our larger bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak.  (After that?  Destroying our smaller bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak.)  The bathroom has forced us into a cascade situation, where each thing we want to replace has forced us to replace another thing, until finally we’re gutting everything but the walls.  And we may still need to pull those down, depending on how successful we are at getting the previous owners’ wallpaper down.  I’m guessing we’ll need to drywall.  We definitely need to kill an unnecessary bulkhead over the tub, so there’s gonna be some drywalling no matter what; we’ll see if we have to do everything.

The budget is $2500 and I’m betting we can come in at 70% of that– it’s a small bathroom, and we don’t exactly have extravagant tastes.  Today’s project is to locate flooring; we’re thinking hard about cork tile and are going to bring the grandparents over to babysit while we hit a bunch of kitchen and bath stores in the area and see what they have available.   If you happened to notice the Instagram picture of the tile floating in a bowl of water from the other day, I bought a bunch of samples home from Lowe’s and spent an afternoon trying to destroy them.  I’m sufficiently satisfied with cork’s resilience to be willing to use it in the bathroom, especially since we’re planning on glue-down and not snap-together tiling.  It should be manageable.

The bulk of the work, right now, is slated to be done over Labor Day weekend, which is– gulp– just a couple of weeks away.  We’ve got a bunch of basic decisions made (picked out the tub, the toilet, a new ceiling fan, etc, although we still need a vanity and we haven’t bought anything yet– we probably ought to spend some money today, though, since the stuff probably isn’t going to show up immediately) but there’s still a fair amount of work to be done before we can start actually doing any work.  And then all of you get to look forward to the blog post where I describe how I destroyed my entire house while trying to install a toilet.

Whee!

In which I do something right the first time

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

photoWas planning on heading into school today again, but last night we finally got sick of the carpet in the hallway and ripped the shit out.  When we first bought the place a friend who lives down the street came over and commented that she’d had the same carpet in her place when they moved in and we were going to hate it.  Man, she couldn’t have been more right.  I’m generally a fan of carpet over hardwood (and this hallway, which bends off to the left at the top of the picture, will eventually have two runners in it) but this shit looked muddy and disgusting within just a couple of weeks of us moving in.  And this isn’t even one of the dog zones in the house; they don’t spend a lot of time in this part of the house and we’re generally not wearing shoes when walking through this hallway either.  But the carpet looked filthy nonetheless.

There was already hardwood in my office and the boy’s room; our room is carpeted, but with a different kind of carpet than what was in the living room and hallway (and, for that matter the dining room) and it’s in much better shape, so we’re going to keep it.  We pulled up the carpet and the padding last night and I spent about an hour and a half this morning ripping tack strips out from by the walls; a bit of consultation with the Internet and Facebook sent me off to buy a couple of prybars this morning that worked wonderfully.  We just need to buy and install a few guards for where the hardwood meets the carpet in the bedroom, the tile in the entryway, and the linoleum in the bathroom.  I was worried that the hardwood was going to be all stained and nasty, but other than a little bit along the wall (look to the left of the vacuum cleaner) that I’m hoping will come up, it looks as good as the flooring in the bedrooms.  Not bad for an hour and a half of work.

Getting some control over the ten thousand different kinds of flooring in this house is becoming more and more necessary.  🙂

In which I help to accomplish something

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

photoAll told, the best thing about rebuilding my brother’s deck yesterday is that it makes a boring story.  That’s not going to stop me from telling it anyway– you’ve been warned– but there’s really not a lot of meat here beyond “hey, we built a deck!”

Actually, the most exciting part of the day happened before I even got to my brother’s house, where I was able to luck into a combination of a great sale at a local hardware store and a couple of coupons and managed to get this drill for about a hundred and forty dollars.  I like tools; I’d been looking for an excuse to buy a better cordless drill for a while, and needing to put 500 or so screws into a deck certainly sounded like a damn fine reason.  I had said in the previous post about the rebuild that we were hoping that we’d find that the structure underneath the deck was still sound and that all we needed to do was redo the upper boards; we had discovered that we were about half right.  I’ll get to the details in a bit.

See the upper-left corner of this picture, how it looks like there are still some boards there?  That was all the demolition we had left to do when I got there, other than removing a bunch of broken nails.  The previous owner had decided that iron nails were a good idea for some reason, and they were all rusted to shit, meaning that they kept breaking, sometimes rather explosively, and a lot of the time the heads were popping off.  So a good portion of the first couple of hours were spent tearing off nails or, in the case of those boards, trying to get those last few sonsofbitches off the structure.  Each of those boards had about fifteen thousand nails in it.  And they were tiny, and spaced close together, and the structure underneath was unpredictable, meaning that that little chunk of demo took maybe a third of the time it took to demolilsh the entire rest of the deck.

Here’s the “half right” part.  The wood underneath was consistently sound, which was very very good, since none of us really had any good idea how to rebuild the support structure for the deck.  The deck in its previous configuration was basically an oversized parquet, and we wanted the boards on the new deck to all be facing the same direction.  What this meant was that half of the support joists were effectively useless since they’d be running in parallel with the new boards.  We were either going to have to rip out the ones going the wrong direction or just reinforce them with new boards going the right way; ultimately we decided to just cut the middle out of each of the ones going the wrong way and hang new ones in the proper direction.

First problem: I hadn’t properly explained what a joist hanger was, and he’d bought corner brackets– which would have worked, but not as easily.  So we sent someone off to Lowe’s and started cutting boards.  Then my father-in-law showed up.  My father-in-law is a general contractor, and we’d asked him to come over to look at the deck and tell us where we were being stupid.

It took him about ten seconds.

(Incidentally:  whenever I use the word “we” here, I’m referring to between four and eight people depending on the time of day.  My brother and I were far from the only people involved in this job; his neighbor and my FIL were both more useful than I was.)

“You can’t use that wood,” he says, pointing at the boards we were going to use for structure.  My brother misses the gesture and thinks he’s talking about the entire deck.

“Why not?”

“It’s untreated.  It’s going to rot out from underneath you.”

I won’t describe his reaction, because it wasn’t terribly funny– he kinda looked like he wanted to shoot himself, but long story short it took a couple of minutes to convince him that my father-in-law was talking about the new boards and not the whole damn thing.  I’m pretty sure my brother’s entire life had flashed before his eyes.  Anyway, we sent someone back out to Lowe’s again and, using the wrong boards, put the joist hangers in place so that all we’d have to do was recut the new, treated boards and drop them into place.  Fun fact about me!  I cannot hammer straight to save my goddamn life, or at least I can’t hammer in a joist hanger while crouching, bending over, or any other configuration of my body that allows me to get anywhere near the hanger in question– and when I do manage to hammer one in properly, I discover I’ve put it in a touch too high and it’s going to make the joist no longer at the same level as the rest of the boards and it has to be torn out.

Oddly, I’m pretty sure that “can’t hammer straight” is the only thing I did incompetently all day; there was some comedy when we were trying to determine how best to attach the deck boards (long story short: predrill everything) but that was about it.

And really?  That’s about it, as far as stories go.  Once we got the new structure in place, there was a little bit of slowdown while we made sure we were measuring everything right and we wouldn’t end up with something stupid happening like needing another inch of board at the last second, and a bit of nonsense with cutting some of the 45 degree angles we needed, but after that everything was smooth as butter.  My dad and my brother brought the lumber back to my father-in-law and my neighbor, who did the cutting, one of his friends and I drilled (her) and screwed (me) the boards into place, and by the time I had to leave and take a shower and go to OtherJob we had about 20-25% of the top boards in place.  The rest of the job just involved finishing that and evening off the edges with a circular saw; I wasn’t there for that part but from what I heard it went smoothly.  And now my brother has a deck that actually functions.

Woohoo!

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