Hello, dining room table! I forgot what you looked like, what with keeping you under a tablecloth for five years. You’re pretty nice! Enjoy the living room; you’re going to live in there today.
One-day job, guys. Say it with me. ONE DAY JOB. 
Tag: flooring
Guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow
No, not taking a nap. That was today. That’s what Thursdays are for lately. No, tomorrow I rip my dining room to shreds and put down new flooring. We’re gonna hope it goes well, because I sort of need for my dining room to have a floor. That’s a thing that’s important to me.
Updates, obviously, coming as it happens.
(After the floor, there will be sushi, and then Luke Cage. If everything goes right, it’ll be a really good day.)
TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Hell Yeah edition
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
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:
- Cut the door trim so that the tile fits underneath it (already done!)
- Fixed the last couple of screws on the plywood piece so that they’re flush
- Measured, cut and glued down the Tavy Thin Skin over the vinyl tile and plywood
- Restored the living room and dining room to usable status
I will consider it a bonus if I have also:
- Laid down a skim coat of mortar over the Thin Skin.
No tiling is planned for today. I’m hoping to get that done this weekend, and I should be able to, especially if I get that skimcoat done.
TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Today’s agenda
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: interlude
Lowe’s wants $2000, sans material costs, to tile our bathroom, which has 37 square feet of floor space and less than 70 square feet of shower wall space. The entire budget for the bathroom is $2500, so… looks like I get to learn how to tile.
I can do this. Really. Honest.
While we were at Lowe’s today getting bad news, the boy was sort of misbehaving. Not really in any large way, just in that toddler “I want to do things that I find interesting, but are not compatible with my health or your desires” sort of way. He got a bit screechy about wanting to push “his cart” (he’s two; everything is his lately) in some direction other than toward the front door after we decided it was time to leave, and I made an Executive Daddy Decision, put my screeching son in the cart, and we took off, mildly embarrassed at the terrible sounds my poor, oppressed little boy was making.
Then we got to the front of the store, where there was a father with three little kids with him. Two boys: the oldest, maybe nine, then maybe a six or seven year old, and an infant of indeterminate gender in a stroller. All three were screaming and crying. The two older boys wanted candy, and were bawling at Daddy’s refusal to buy them candy, repeatedly insisting that he justify his non-purchasing-candy ways for them. The infant was also screaming, probably just because its brothers were.
My son isn’t old enough for me to have had to make any real decision about physically disciplining him yet. I am ambivalent about whether spanking an older child is ever a useful practice. I am certain that it is worse than useless with a two-year-old.
And I’m not sure whether I think this guy should have full-on slapped both of his kids in their faces for their stupid, embarrassing public display of bullshit or whether I respect him for his restraint. One way or another, he got out of the store without beating either of his spoiled-ass kids, although I can’t vouch for what happened when he got them back to the car.
“I forgive you,” I whispered into my son’s ear.
Maybe I don’t want him to get much older.
Terrible Decisions, Stage Four: Spendin’ Money
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!