TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The Destructioning

On December 20, 2021 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.

On being dumb and confused, in that order

On April 2, 2018April 2, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Take a look at that there can of Mountain Dew. Just take a second and look at it.

Oh, wait, I’m sorry, I meant “Mtn Dew,” since the company decided that a weird abbreviation instead of a perfectly normal word was how they wanted to be known from now on. I assume trademarks are involved somehow and either way I think it’s stupid.

If you follow me on Twitter or on Instagram (and if you don’t, why not, dammit?) you may already be aware that I discovered a truly epic splat of bird shit on the door of my car when I left for work this morning– fully four or five inches wide, big enough that I have to assume it came from the bald eagle that’s been spotted around here recently, because normal birds don’t shit this big. I mean, hell, it was a big enough splat of bird shit that I took a picture of it and put that picture on the Internet, and I don’t feel bad about it, because you would have done the exact same damn thing.

But anyway. That huge splat of bird shit meant that I needed to hit a gas station on the way home to clean it off. Also for gas. And also, as it turned out, for caffeine, since as soon as I got to the gas station I realized I needed Mountain Dew.

And then I saw that can, and I saw the flavor– for Christ’s sake, crafted green apple kiwi, which is absolutely guaranteed to not be anything I want to drink, and with a word in the name that does not belong there at all to boot– and, for no clear reason, I bought the can, because the can looked so good, and despite knowing that it wasn’t going to taste very good I spent money on it anyway.

This is a gatdamb miracle of marketing over my own good common sense, and I knew it at the time and did it anyway. And then discovered that the beverage itself was a poisonous-looking green in color, not far off from the pull tab at the top, and the color that we used to use for things like antifreezes to signal that they shouldn’t be consumed, and of course it tasted like ass. But Mtn Dew has my money, for something I didn’t want and knew beforehand I wouldn’t like, because yay cool can!

Sigh.

Just over a year ago I wrote this post about a shitty, shitty house full of shitty, shitty people near me that I noticed had been foreclosed on by the bank and sold at auction. The house was purchased and torn down nearly instantly, and is currently open green space. What I left out, because it wasn’t relevant, was that there was a second shitty house not far down the road from the first shitty house. These folks didn’t raise my ire because of the lack of white supremacist symbols on the house, and in fact it appeared to be abandoned anyway– but it must have been a terrible place to live in, because each and every time it rained, no matter how small of a rain, the entire front yard would flood. Heavy rain could leave puddles in the yard for weeks. I can only imagine the mold that must have been inside that house.

I drove past it Saturday night on the way home and the whole house was gone, leaving behind evidence of what sure as hell looked like an explosion. Today, with better light, I stopped and took a couple of pictures. Does this look like the results of a deliberate demolition to anyone?

This would have been where the house was and, I think, a bit of the back yard. You can see what looks like a piece of siding in the middle of this picture, but I promise there used to be a whole ass house there. The picture is taken from a distance because the place is surrounded by a fence. In particular, look at that tree on the right, and look at how it looks like the big branch bisecting that tree seems to have split the entire thing in half. What the shit happened here?

The house behind it, by the way, appears to be fine, and there’s no visible damage to any of the trees or the grass or anything on their lot.

This is a view of what would have been their front yard. None of that looks like construction or demolition debris to me– it all looks like exploded tree. I don’t even see anything that looks like a foundation anywhere– the house doesn’t have a footprint any longer at all.

I can’t find any news articles or any references to anything having happened there recently. I feel like if there had been a big fire or something there would have been an article about it– but nothing looks burned. Anybody have any theories?

I was, by the by, unable to fully clean off the birdshit. It’s gonna take a rainstorm.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Today’s agenda

On July 21, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Got a lot done yesterday, including averting/dealing with one major setback when the floor didn’t turn out to be quite what we thought it was. Ordered new underlayment for the tile today that ought to be here by Friday, so we didn’t lose much time over it.

Anyway, here’s what’s happening today:

Pull out the old sink and vanity
Get rid of the rest of the wallpaper
RedGard and mud the piece of cement board we put in yesterday
If time allows, dry-fit the floor tile

That’ll be a day, I think. Whee!

Terrible Decisions: why not, one more

On January 1, 2014January 1, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

I’m done for the day– nails pulled, tub swept, vacuumed, and cleaned, 99% of the drywall out of the way. There’s a half-inch gap between the wall on the left and the back wall, and there’s still some drywall in the corners that I’m gonna have to use a chisel or something to get out, but it’s not something I feel like I have to worry about at this exact second. We can bathe the boy tonight, and that’s the important thing. I even clipped the dead wire and moved it out of the way so there’s no electrocution worries. (Yes, I know you can’t electrocute yourself with a dead wire. Still don’t want it dangling where my two-year-old has a chance of getting to it, especially if he’s in the tub at the time.)

Next step: rebuild.

Which is terrifying. 🙂

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: OH SHIT THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING

On January 1, 2014January 1, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Stage one: tub successfully taped off, a chore that I proved entirely incompetent at doing. All nice and pretty.

Stage Two: I knew there were some wires back here, and exposed the junction box when I demolished the wall on the left. “Huh,” I said. “The fuck’s that doing there?” I had thought it was two different wires going to two different places, but no– a live wire runs down to the junction box, then swings back up dead and loops around through the drywall (and through what used to be the bulkhead) only to dangle uselessly behind the wall. There apparently used to be a power switch on the wall behind the bathtub (which is our entryway) but they removed it when they wallpapered. Still not sure where the other (live) wire heads off to.

Finding what you think is a live wire behind a wall while you’re hammering away is fun, by the way. Nice moment or two of soul-shattering OH SHIT I’M GONNA DIE terror. It’s like cardio!

Not much left but details at this point– cleaning up around nails and pulling the back and right parts of the old bulkhead, which are above the top of this picture, but I need to be on a stepladder to do that and I need to clean out the tub before I get on the stepladder. Taking a break for lunch and to clear drywall dust out of my lungs before I clean everything up.

(Random note: my iPad fits perfectly inside a gallon-size ziplock bag, which lets me listen to music without getting shit all over my iPad. Whee!)

So… yeah. I suppose we actually have to rebuild this now.

Terrible Decisions, Stage Four: Spendin’ Money

On September 4, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

And that’s our vanity, except six inches narrower than the one we bought. For some reason, I’m super excited about the vanity; I like the way the sink slopes gently downward into the basin rather than having straight up-and-down walls– although as soon as the boy learns how much fun splashing around in that sink is going to be I’m probably going to regret it. I am… working on the faucet. This is the thing that MLW and I have most disagreed on, I think– I’m completely in love with this kind of faucet and she hates it.

Also purchased: a matching mirror. We’re also going to get a cabinet but didn’t pick it up tonight because we’re not a hundred percent certain where we want to put it yet.

Tile dude was here yesterday; we should have the estimate on the tiling in the very near future. Whee!

In other news, I got two and a half inches of grading done tonight before deciding I was done grading. I’m sending home progress reports on Friday and I need to write an Algebra test tonight, too. Instead I will probably watch a couple of hours of MasterChef and then read a book. Like I said: Whee!

Terrible Decisions, Stage Three

On September 2, 2013September 2, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

photo (1)

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.

Terrible Decisions, Stage Two

On August 24, 2013August 24, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

We 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.