demolition – Page 2 – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

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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!

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Today’s Cavalcade of Fail will involve going over to my brother’s house and helping him rebuild his deck, which is currently in the no-particular-skill-needed “demolition” phase. His deck is rotten and nasty and has been since he bought his house and he’s apparently finally gotten tired of it, so the old deck is getting ripped down this week and the new deck is slated to get rebuilt on Saturday.

I am hoping beyond all hope that we’ll find out that the structure underneath the deck is sound and that what went wrong with the previous one is just that the owners failed to properly waterproof the thing. He claims that that may be the case based on what he’s already torn up; if I’m right than all we should have to do is pull up the old boards and then screw new ones into the old structure. If the old structure isn’t sound then this is going to be a much more complicated process and we are almost certainly going to do it terribly wrong.

Frankly I’ll be perfectly happy if I manage to make it through today without injuring myself; we’ll worry about Saturday on Saturday.

At least y’all will have a story about how I badly injured myself to look forward to.

Memo to Guitar Center: I know you like having the lots of merchandise near the floor thing and the whole crowded aisles thing; your store is niche enough that you’re never going to have a thousand customers in there at one time and it’s cool to have stuff everywhere to look at and apparently the whole “labyrinth” approach to your floor layout appeals to something in your corporate culture. I’m good with that.

Maybe, though, if you’re going to have $800 guitars, you don’t set them so that if you take half a step backwards while trying to look at a harmonica that is pegboarded a foot off the ground you bump into that $800 guitar and almost knock it onto the floor, causing employees to shriek at you OH MY GOD DON’T MOVE while they rush over and rescue the precious piece of inventory before it slides off of your back and hits the ground. Especially when said $800 guitar is, for no clear reason, nowhere near any other guitars and hanging perilously to begin with. I cannot possibly have been the first person to bump into this goddamn thing. Make better layout choices, please. I shouldn’t be able to describe any part of a retail store as a booby trap, y’know?

Heh. Booby.