The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Okay, not really, there are still four days of school left— but the first Big Projekt of the summer has been accomplished. My wife decided that she hated how the porch looked (sadly, I lack a before picture at the moment, but I’ll see what I can find) so she spent the week stripping, etching, washing and repainting the floor out here, and I spent yesterday putting furniture together, and I’m pretty damn pleased with the results.
Four more days. Just four more. We can do this.
It will not surprise you to learn that I have been putting off a number of things that needed doing, and as a result it is the Sunday before I have to go back to work and I have a number of Things that need accomplishing. That said … the reading room is done? Or close enough, at least? I need to do something with that shelf in the middle, there, the one that is leaning to the side; hopefully I can come up with a way to push the shelf next to it a couple inches over to shore it up a bit without removing every single Goddamned book off of the shelves again. We had one bookshelf fall apart moving it from the living room to here, and several of these are not going to survive another transition, but if I can pin it between two shelves that are more or less properly vertical we ought to be okay.
I’ll put up some pictures of the living room and the bathroom soon too; the living room’s conversion is complete, barring only some cable management behind the TV that — wait for it — I’ve been putting off, and, well, the bathroom is exciting. But for now I’m going to cross “blog post” off of my to-do list and move on to something else. I gotta make it through five days this week and then I get a three-day weekend for MLK Day; I should be able to manage that, I think.
New sectional, sitting on the new carpet:
Former dining room now has comfy chairs in it, although it’s not quite ready for prime time yet:
You can see the shape of what we’re getting at here, I think, although there’s still work to do and not everything is in its final place. The chandelier is getting replaced with more appropriate lighting, the table in the corner is going away, we need to a rug and some side tables into the room, and many of the books will end up being moved to the as-yet-unordered new shelving going in the living room.
And what will eventually be the dining room:
This room needs a lot of work before it looks like a dining room, obviously, and a number of the things in here are going to end up in the former dining room, but again, you can get the idea we’re going for, more or less. This room needs the most work but I think we’re going to be really happy with it once we’ve moved beyond the “table in the middle of what is obviously not a dining room” stage.
Happy Thanksgiving, y’all. Prrrobably no post tomorrow,(*) although who knows, and there will definitely be no videos up at YouTube, because I’d have to have them recorded by now and it’s already 9:00. So see you on Black Friday.
(*)I’m sure I’m lying. Every time I say anything close to “I probably won’t post tomorrow,” I end up posting anyway.
Now we’ve just got to … uh … put all the Goddamned furniture back.
Great!
I’m not sure why the walls look so yellow; I can assure you they are white, although we’re considering repainting because they’re ugly white.
This is what the dining room looks like now:
There is a row of bookshelves behind that row of bookshelves, plus the one against the wall that decided to commit suicide rather than be relocated. In all honesty, I’m surprised we got away with only one going ‘splode on us, given how old and cheap these shelves are.
More changes coming! Stay tuned.
First things first: there will be a review of the Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney+ series, but I’m waiting another couple of days for the fallout to settle and give folks a chance to watch it, because everything I have to say about it concerns the finale, and you best believe I’m going to spoil the shit out of the show. The short version is that I was already enjoying myself, and that the finale did a great job of wrapping the whole program up in a neat little bow, and (this is why it has to be a spoiler review) the way it integrates itself into existing continuity is fucking fascinating.
So the real reason that we cleared the basement out was that our son is ten and it no longer makes a whole lot of sense to be holding on to things like his bassinet and all of his baby toys and plastic crate after plastic crate of toddler-size clothing. Bu the other real reason we did this is that we’re converting the basement to a home gym. You may recall– I think I was blogging way back then– that I used to lift weights pretty religiously, and while I was never “cut” by any stretch of the imagination I used to at least have the chest of somebody who picked things up and put them back down. It was exercise that I enjoyed, at any rate, but once we moved to the opposite side of town from my gym, and even more once my brother moved out of town, driving for half an hour to get to a gym to work out by myself stopped being a thing that I did. We’ve had the idea to do this with the basement for a while now, and there’s already a treadmill and an exercise bike down there, and a few things still yet to be added. There’s some painting to be done and a few other tasks, but my job this afternoon was to get the floor washed and vacuumed (there used to be a huge, ugly, yellow, 1970’s-era area rug down here; we gave it away during the garage sale) and get the mats down and get the bench and the rack put together. I was going to wait until the entire basement was done to post any pictures, but this was a fair amount of damn work and screw it I wanna celebrate now, so I’m going to.
And then, uh, I gotta make myself use it. That’s … probably going to be the hard part. But hey! New shiny stuff!
I’m not putting up a picture of my new shower door, which after many delays got put in today, because I am angry at it. I’m pretty sure the Goddamned thing got ordered incorrectly, because the piece of glass on the right, the one that doesn’t move, is fully an inch higher than the one on the left that is the actual door. Everything appears to have been installed correctly; the guy who did the work visibly winced as soon as I noticed the height differential, and I’m pretty sure that “uneven” isn’t a style. It already took, what, four months extra to get this thing in place?
Oh, and the vanity was definitely sent to us in the wrong size. This is the second vanity, mind you; the first one arrived crushed. This one was six inches bigger than it was supposed to be and doesn’t fit in the space we have for it.
And since we don’t have the right vanity, we’re still using the loaner they gave us, which means they had to remove the cabinet, which they put in first, because the loaner vanity and the cabinet don’t play nice with each other, so for a while today I had my nice new bathroom cabinet in place and now I don’t have it anymore.
I’m fucking tired.
I find myself in the incredibly odd position of needing to take some time tonight to read the owner’s manual for my new toilet and– wait for it– program the remote control. That is a true sentence.
That is because the lid to the toilet there is actually a bidet— if you look closely you’ll see the power icons and such on the back of the seat– and I have no idea how to make it work. I fiddled with the remote and was unable to get it to spray any water at me so we’ll have to see what finagling is necessary to get it working.
The rest of the bathroom is kind of interesting. There are a number of pieces we don’t have yet. You see a corner of the vanity in that picture; that’s not our vanity, which arrived with some significant damage, so they gave us a loaner. As a former furniture salesman who is aware that furniture is made of wood, I’m not pressed about it. The cabinet isn’t in just yet, and since we don’t have the actual vanity, we’re holding off on installing the mirror until we can center it properly. The doors and all the various hanger-things go on (or back on) tomorrow. The actual shower door needed to wait for precise measurements once the tile was in, so that’s still a couple of weeks out; we’ll make do with a tension rod and a curtain until then, which is fine. And speaking of the shower:
That’s our actual shower head, but (again) we have some loaner pieces– if you look at the actual pipe coming out of the wall and the ring on it, they’re both chrome as opposed to the brushed nickel we have everywhere else. That’s also waiting on backordered stuff and they’ll swap it out once we get the right pieces. The two little holes on the right are for the (again, no shit) remote for the shower head, which is too high for my wife to reach easily; the remote was a BIG selling point for her. I’m not even going to show the vanity, as again, it’s the wrong one, but here’s the (correct) lighting sconce:
I should probably crop that, but whatever.
More tomorrow, once the rest of the bits and bobs go in, and then we’re going to be done for a while until the “real” pieces show up.
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