Tag: home improvement

After

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Just as a reminder, this is what the roof looked like yesterday, this time heavily cropped:

This is what the internet said our new roof was going to look like:

And this is what our new roof looks like, although it’s gotten a bit overcast outside, unfortunately:

To my eyes, the roof-in-actuality looks a touch lighter than the sample does, but not in a way that’s displeasing; I’m pretty happy with it, and it’s done already, and I was figuring it would be at least a two-day job. We got some light rain for a little while, which didn’t appear to bother anyone, and while I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about the job at least looks well done from ground-level. We’ve talked about springing for a third-party inspection to see what someone who knows roofing says about it, but the guys who did the work were conscientious as hell about nearly every aspect of the job that I might be able to fairly evaluate (my sole complaint: a couple of plants in the back yard have either been stepped on or were covered with tarp for a while, but they look like they’ll recover) right down to having several guys going over the lawn with what turned out to basically be giant magnets on wheels to get every last nail that might have fallen off the roof. I’ve been around the house twice and I can’t find a single scrap of roofing material anywhere. I figure if they’re that fanatical about cleaning up after themselves there’s at least a decent chance that the work itself is good. I can hope, at least.

This is what it looked like when they were unloading the actual shingles, by the way:

I don’t know what the hell I thought they were bringing the shingles over on, but I wasn’t expecting a giant-ass crane to lift the pallets up to the roof to be unloaded up there. It was pretty cool to watch, honestly.

Also, this:

Similarly, the new water softener is in “this appears to work and not be leaking, so I’m good” territory, although I can more carefully inspect new piping that I can actually see than roof work that I can’t, and it all looks very clean and nicely done, so I’m happy. We will see what life with soft water is like now.

If anybody’s local and wants to know who we used (well, okay, you can see the name of the water folks right there in the picture) let me know.

Before

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Pictured: the mess of pipes that had not one but two different water softener people swearing at the level of redundancy and poor decision-making required to have installed it in the first place. To the left is the ancient previous water softener, which has not been active since we moved into the house. My understanding is that several of these pipes are going to go away tomorrow to be replaced with something more streamlined and sensible.

Also tomorrow: the roof gets ripped off of the house. Here’s what the roof currently looks like:

I mean, okay, that’s more a picture of a storm on its way than the roof, but who takes pictures of their roof? Nobody. I figure they’ll at least get to the part where that’s torn off tomorrow; I don’t have a firm idea of how long this entire process is supposed to take, but I assume sometime in the next few days I’m going to have a new roof and new eaves and all that fun stuff.

The roofers are supposed to be here by 7:30 in the morning and the softener guys are here before 10, so I gotta get up early to get all water-using tasks out of the way before they arrive, and also to keep the roofers from taking up the entire driveway, since I’d like the water guys to not have to cart pipes from halfway across the world before taking them into the basement. It’s going to be a long, expensive day tomorrow, but hopefully I’ll have some neat pictures to share with you by tomorrow night.

And here we go again

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

I’ve posted a couple of times recently about how we are embarking on a new round of home improvement around here; the new roof is more or less set in stone and is happening in a couple of weeks, the new bathroom is almost certainly happening (more on that in a bit) but doesn’t have a timeline yet, and today we had someone out to talk to us about a new water softener.

Technically this would be a replacement water softener, but the one it would be replacing has never been used once in the entire time we’ve lived in the house and may actually be as old as the house itself. I’m not going to go looking for posts right now, but I know I’ve talked about this house and its plumbing issues before: the original builder was a contractor, and there are clearly things about this house that were done by someone who knew what they were doing and was concerned about doing a good job, and … and then there’s the plumbing, which … was not. We have had people out before to look at the plumbing and they have declined the job, and when the water softener guy went into our basement to look at the existing “system” and the various pipes involved in bringing water into our house and moving it around, it literally rendered him speechless. He was so shocked and horrified that he couldn’t get through a sentence for a good twenty minutes. This is not an exaggeration.

We are being charged for installation. He was very apologetic for this, saying that installation was usually included in the cost of the unit, but there is so much repiping required and so much work necessary to figure out just what the fuck all these pipes are for that he felt he had no choice. We asked how often they felt like they needed to charge, and the answer was that in seventeen years of water softening he never had.

My wife and I spent most of the consult laughing our asses off at how clearly flummoxed this poor guy was. He’s bringing three other guys out with him when they come out for the install. It was hilarious.

I asked him whether he thought it would be okay if I documented their attempts to fix our system for the Internet, and he got a little twinkle in his eye and suggested we video the whole thing. I think I like this dude.

(Re: the bank; further cementing my wife’s theory that banking is bullshit, I had a car drive very slowly past our house today, pausing for about a minute at the foot of our driveway. The car had a magnetic sign on the door, but as I was in my office looking out the window at the time (and teaching a class, for that matter) I was unable to read it. If I find out that that was the appraiser, who did nothing more than basically ascertain that a house did in fact exist at the address we provided, I’m going to laugh my ass off. Then I’m going to hire a couple of black actors to go into that bank with exactly the same information we had and ask for a loan and see if they’re handed thirty grand as easily as we were.)

In which I am a dummy dumb-dumb dummyfacehead

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

You are looking at the interior of the cabinet under the sink in the master bathroom. Ignore the terrible wallpaper in the back; it’s not my fault, I didn’t put it there. There’s probably four more layers underneath it, too.

Several months ago– I don’t know how many; it could have been a year for all the fuck I know– Sushi climbed under there and somehow managed to collapse that shelf. It has been collapsed and lying at an angle for a very, very long time, and it has annoyed me every single fucking time I have looked at it during that time. Now, granted, this isn’t terribly often, as I don’t need to open the cabinet very frequently, but there’s some shit we’ve just been keeping on top of the vanity for all this time because the shelf was collapsed.

Why haven’t I fixed it? Laziness, and the fact that I am old and fat and absolutely loathe having to sit on the floor. But I have resolved for every single fucking weekend for months to get down there, figure out what was broken, replace it, and get that Goddamn shelf fixed. I figured I might have to find some pegs she knocked loose and put them back in place; the worst-case scenario was that one of them was actually broken and I’d have to make a quick run to the hardware store to buy a dowel or something. But I didn’t want to crawl around on the floor, didn’t want to dig around in that cabinet– it’s deep; I can’t reach the back of it without sticking my head inside– and I am, again, incredibly lazy.

I finally, tonight, managed to get my fat ass on the ground in front of it, OutKast playing on my phone, convinced that come hell and high water I was going to fix this fucking shelf.

Which involved picking it up and placing it on top of that dark brown support on the right there, which is screwed into the wall. The two pieces of perpendicular white wood are glued & screwed and aren’t coming apart.

It took ten seconds.

It took longer for me to stand up once I was done than it did to fix the fucking shelf.

No pegs. No bent nails or screws. Not even anything with any weight or requiring any real application of muscle power. I just picked the fucking thing up and put it back on the shelf. I mean, it might fall off again at some point, especially if a cat decides to wedge herself into that corner again. I could screw it in place, I suppose. But I’ve been putting this job off for months and it took ten seconds.

Fucksake.

In which we finish a project

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

The boy’s room is done! All we need to do now is get all of his shit out of my room and my office and put it back in his! And that’s his problem! Hooray!

The final project was to get the curtains up; I’m going to be honest: I was scared of this, as getting things that require drilling multiple holes and using drywall anchors straight, level, and even is not something that I’ve ever been very good at. I’m not gonna promise that this is contractor-quality measurement but neither of us can see anything wrong looking at it and frankly that’s all I care about.

The other corner, with a couple more of the trees. We bought him a new bed– I managed to destroy his old bed frame, don’t ask– but it won’t be here until September so for now the box springs and mattress are just on the floor.

CONTROVERSIAL DECISION: we decided to leave his door and the closet door alone. While neither of us liked the yellow in the room, with everything repainted I actually like how they look, and since they would have been a pain in the ass to paint anyway we decided to stick with the original color. I don’t love how it looks next to the white furniture but whatever.

We need to get him another lamp today, because the room is a bit darker than it used to be, but that’s the last touch.

EDIT: I have been informed there has been a decor change since I’ve started typing this.

Each of the six trees now contains a Porkachorp. I feel very bad for this one, who only wants the little birdie to be his friend:

As it works out, this is the one you’re looking straight at if you’re standing in the doorway of his room looking from the hallway, so I can look forward to this haunting me for the rest of the time I live in this house.

(Also, my wife and I have both noticed that our cameras are having a hell of a time with the green color; the best look at what it actually looks like is the brighter corner of green in the top picture. If the room is dark, the darker leaves go blue, which is *fascinating*.)

Some updates

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I wanted to post more pictures of the boy’s room today, but it’s not quite done yet– one patch of wall maybe a foot square needs a touch more paint on it, the tree decals need to all be put in place, and we need to hang his curtains– and for some reason I don’t want to put up any more in-progress pictures. So have a sleepy kitty.

PAINTING! All in all I’m happier with how the project turned out than I thought it was going to be; I spent most of the first day of painting muttering it’s not my room under my breath and looking forward to repainting the entire mess again in five years when he grows out of it, but now that it’s mostly finished I feel like we did a pretty good job. More soon.

VISION! I have this thing going where I either stop paying attention to my eyes or they get noticeably better once about noon rolls around. I’m still kind of frustrated with mid- and long-distance vision, and even close up can be kind of spotty for the first couple of hours after I get up. I had a long talk with a friend of mine who also had the surgery earlier in the week and she assured me that everything was within normal parameters; despite trying to not be impatient about the healing process I think I’m expecting too much too soon.

VAGUEBLOGGING! I hoped I was going to have good news this week. I do not have good news. Strictly speaking I don’t have bad news either, but this is one of those situations where no news and bad news are indistinguishable. I am not very happy with the world right now.

AUGUST! Nobody knows anything. The superintendent’s plan has been radically revised three times in three weeks, the county health department released their own plan, and dominos are falling across the state as more and more districts go to online-only for the first nine weeks, which is the only available responsible decision. Remember: I’m not dying for your child care, nor am I endangering my family, period; and there is no magic switch that flips in August that prevents whatever you’ve been doing with your kids since March from working any longer. We have a school board meeting on Monday and I fully expect to find out at that time that we are online only for the full first quarter, at which point we can reset the clock until we make another last-second decision in October.

THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS! I’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on noted dipshit Herman Cain over the last few weeks; turns out that being an idiot about masks earned him a final month of his life where he was isolated from his family and struggling to breathe before he died alone and ignominiously. I hope that hour or two where he was courageously owning the lib orthodoxy by not protecting himself from a highly communicable disease that didn’t know or care that he was a Republican was worth that pain for him. I suspect not. I also wonder how many other people that Tulsa rally killed who aren’t famous enough for us to know their names.

BOOKS! I recently finished Lisbeth Campbell’s excellent debut The Vanished Queen, which isn’t actually out for a couple of weeks. I read a very early draft of this and it was amazing to see how much had changed since I’d seen it. There is a review coming, but I’m waiting for a go-ahead from her to publish it. I’m currently reading Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching, which I’m also quite enjoying but am having some trouble getting into because my eyes haven’t been cooperating when I pick it up. This one will probably get a review too at some point.

KAMALA? Word on the street is that Biden is going to announce his VP pick possibly as early as tomorrow and certainly by next week, and word also is that it’s going to be Kamala Harris, which would be just about the only thing about next week that could lift my mood. Please, goddammit, give me this one fucking thing. Well, this thing and that other thing that you haven’t given me yet, but at least one of them.

It’s really green

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

My wife is on vacation all this week, so we decided to cross off a project from our list and get the boy’s bedroom painted. It’s been this moderately awful straw-yellow color since we moved in, and it was time to fix it.

We decided to go ahead and let him decide what color to paint it, and immediately had to talk him out of a wild hand-painted jungle scheme that no one in the house has the remotest ability to pull off. We talked him down to green walls and a blue ceiling, with tree decals winging their way to the house via the internet. He did a fair amount of cleaning and decluttering and moving stuff out of his room yesterday and we started the painting today. I figure it’s at least a three-day job; we’re done for the day but tomorrow we’ll finish the painting and depending on when the decals arrive on Thursday hopefully we can get them up right away and be done.

At any rate, pictures:

What we started with this morning. There are also new curtains to be hung once the painting is done.

Preparatory taping completed.

I forget if this was after one coat or two of the blue on the ceiling, but I did that while my wife did trim and baseboards in the green.

We pressed him into service once we started actually putting paint on the walls. He was a bit sloppier than we wanted, but all in all he did a pretty decent job until he decided he was tired and retired to iPaddery in the other room.

And this is where we left it, considerably greener than I thought it was going to be, but whatever, it’s not my damn room. Tomorrow we’ll touch up the ceiling where we need it, pull the tape protecting the walls from blue, retape to protect the ceiling from green, get the edges and second coat as needed, and paint the door and the closet door. I will, of course, post additional pictures once it’s all done.

In which I get summer break sorted out

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Photography4 Comments

So here’s what I did today. It was supposed to take 45 minutes.

The yard, prepared.
The tarp!
Initial layout of the pool.
My assistant, assisting.
Right here is the 45-minute mark, where the box said we were supposed to be done. Ha! No.
All of the piping and frame in place.
My assistant tests the ladder. It’s sturdy enough but it could be wider; I can see myself having trouble getting *out* of the pool– in will be easy, obviously, because of the water.
It’s gonna be quite a bit deeper than I initially imagined. It won’t be filled to the top, of course, but this is way less of a kiddie pool than I’d pictured.
Starting to put the water in. This will take a REALLY long time to fill. Total elapsed construction time before we started putting water in: about two hours, and not a terribly strenuous two hours, either. Not bad, really.
The filter, and my solution for the fact that the filter really doesn’t want to sit on the ground without falling over.

So, yeah, we’re gonna have a pool in the back yard this summer. Total cost was about $450, and a membership in the local neighborhood pool that we’d have to get in the car to go to is around $325, so I figure even if we only get a couple of seasons out of it it’ll be worth the money. I did the math; it’s a 48″ pool and it’s filling at about 4″ an hour so it’s literally going to take half a damn day to fill it up.

Also, across the 15 feet of the pool we’re only about 1.25″ off from level. I’m pretty certain that’s about as good as it gets in a back yard.

I’ll post another picture or two once it’s actually filled tomorrow, and then there’s chemicals and shit before we can start swimming in it on a regular basis, plus I’m sure it’ll rain for the next two weeks.

Whee!