The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Came home, died in my chair, and then ate some pizza, and now in lieu of an actual post, please accept this picture of my new closet, complete with my clothes and the new motion-detecting lighting I’ve added. I thought for a minute that all my shit wasn’t going to fit, but that’s because I don’t understand how hangers work.
Check out the new closet, y’all:
The right half is mine, since 95% of my clothes can be hung; the left half is my wife’s, who has more complex clothing needs. She is so excited about all the extra drawers, guys. Obviously we have a bit of trim work to do, that wasn’t covered by the scope of work with the closet people, and I think we might add some subtle lighting to the little gap between the top of the closet and the ceiling, but my week of all my clothes being on temporary racks in the living room is soon to come to a close. And doors! Doors that will close! Doors that will close, and hide my clothing from the outside word! Oh frabjous day, calloo, callay!
The overhead light still needs to go, and there are three really stubborn nails that I may just cut off instead of pulling, but we are basically ready for the new closet to go in at this point. This was way easier than either of us thought it was going to be.
More later, probably.
Guess what’s happening later this week?
Let’s see. I promised a real post today, after several days of brief whines about being tired, only … really, all I did today was clear out my closet. A little bit of shopping for my son’s birthday later in the week. And I put together my parent contact log for this year, which, damn it, I’m going to use, and I’m going to use it because I’m going to be better about contacting parents.
I’ve been saying this for 22 years and it hasn’t happened; I hate talking to parents. This will be the year, though, I swear. I also dug into discipline data from last year and it turns out that my current group of kids had considerably fewer office referrals than either of the other two grades last year, which was an interesting thing to find out. Tomorrow, in between– ahem– some bouts of demolition work, I need to do lesson planning, because it turns out I do actually have to teach this week. And so it goes.
That probably doesn’t count as a real post. I guess it’s good that this is my blog and it’s up to me. 🙂
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.