New sofa!

…same kid.

I HATE YOU PINK CARPET

But this is the last piece.

Making progress


I’m over halfway done, I’d say– there is no carpet under or behind the bed, which is a king-size and by far the most unwieldy piece of furniture in the room. Should be able to finish the job tomorrow.

Now I get to go to OtherJob from five to eleven.  Whee!

AFTER


This was the test patch to make sure the floor was what we thought it was.  Guess what I’m doing this weekend?

BEFORE

I think I’ll get myself in trouble.

New hotnesses

  
The ones in the middle, but in white.  Arriving next week.  Woo!

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: PHASE 2 COMPLETE

We hadn’t stopped working; I just decided a few days ago that I wasn’t doing any more updates until shit looked good.

Shit looks good.

IMG_2814Another look at the shower tile (finished over winter break) and the new toilet.  The new toilet is wonderful.  If you shit God, God will be flushed.  As a fat man, I appreciate this.  The new toilet is not leaking.  Did I ever show you the new floor tile?  That’s not leaking either, but tile generally doesn’t do that.

IMG_2819The new vanity and countertop.  This… is a bit more of a problem.  Everything you can see is not leaking, is hooked up, and works beautifully.  Note that I also put new floor trim in, although you can’t see it too well.  It’s just trim; trim’s not actually terribly impressive.  But it’s there!

IMG_2821

Closeup of the countertop and the new faucet.  I love this countertop a LOT.  I’m also glad that the vanity is taller than the old one, because it means that the boy’s going to have to grow a bit before he’s tall enough to splash water out of the sink, and hopefully by then he’ll be less likely to wantonly splash stuff around.  Yes, the distance from the faucet to the electrical outlet is within code; yes, I’m also putting safety stops into the outlets when they’re not being used.

IMG_2817This shit right here is not my fault.  And it’s leaking.  (And it’s better than it looks, because that one PVC join that is obviously crooked is not crooked any longer.)  The supply lines to the faucet are working beautifully and appear to be watertight; the rest of it, not so much.

Basically it’s leaking at the one spot that is obviously bad, which does not surprise me, as joining those two pipes in that fashion was basically a kludge involving crossed fingers.  The PVC-galvanized join is strong and so is the join where the trap joins with the pipe coming out of the wall.  I need to talk to some folks who know better than me and come up with something better than the kludge.  I also need to fix a new leak that popped up by the drain that wasn’t there originally, because in all the screwing around with the pipes I accidentally loosened the top (blue) pipe too much and now it’s leaking too.

I will wait a few days, do some research and some thinking, and then take another shot at this, and if I can’t get it right the second time I’ll just suck it up and call a plumber.  I’m not actually upset about this; it’s leaking at a spot that I knew was dodgy and it’s not leaking enough that it renders the sink unusable.  If I need to wash my hands or my face in that sink, it’ll be fine; the pot underneath will catch the small amount of water that comes out.  I just want it perfect.

Later this week, we’ll get into what Phase 3 entails.  Phase 3 is the final phase.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Hell Yeah edition

Quite a lot accomplished in the last 24 hours or so.
IMG_2781That 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:

IMG_2797

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.