In the absence of an actual post, since I have no thinkythoughts in my brain at all right now, enjoy this picture of my new shower, and contemplate how weird the reflections and shadows are.
Tag: home renovation
Rebathroomed!
As you can see from the strip of unmudded, unpainted drywall and the conspicuous lack of a shower door, we’re not quite done– the shower door is running late and should be here later this week, and they’ll take care of that part of the wall and a couple of other very minor tasks at that time. But I’d say we’re 90% done, and we threw a shower curtain on a tension rod on there so that we can shower in 24 hours after everything finishes curing, and the new floor is completely done.
So, progress? I’ll take it. Now we just have to figure out how to tie everything together, because the existing towels and bathroom mats and art on the walls do not work nicely with the blue in the new shower surround. But hopefully this fucker won’t leak.
TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Not this crap again
Remember four and a half years ago, when we redid the master bathroom? Quite possibly not, as I doubt there are a ton of you who have been around that long. Well, it doesn’t matter, because we’re doing it again! Turns out that the new/old shower leaked. A lot! Which was the whole reason we redid it in the first place– because the first shower leaked, and we replaced it, and now the second shower has leaked, possibly worse than the first one did, and now we’re replacing that, and I’m down a bathroom again for, hopefully, just a few days. They’re telling us they’re going to be done by Monday, assuming everything shows up– we’re still waiting on the door and the flooring but that should be in tomorrow or Saturday, and it’ll be the last stuff to get done anyway, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
The flooring this time will extend into the laundry room, off there to the left, and we’re keeping the same vanity and cabinet and mirror and toilet and bidet we had before, and we are hoping not to have to repaint. We have gone with a built-in shower because I hate tile eternally and forever; I love the fact that the only tile in this house that has held up is the tile that I installed, in the hallway bathroom, and by “I love the fact” I need you to understand that I hate tile and I hate grout and I will hate them until twelve years after I die. At any rate, we’ll see how the new look for the shower works with the new floor tile (it’s not tile, it’s vinyl rectangles, but whatever) and then we’ll see if we need to do anything else with color to pull the room together. I’m worried that the room is going to look a little mismatched with the dark woods but no more dark tile.
At any rate, expect me to be screaming into the abyss for the next few days.
(Oh, also, summer school is finished as of today, so I’m on For Real For Real Summer Break now for the next month or so.)
Still going
We are still doing shit around here.
Got up at six. By 9:00 I was downstairs wrecking these shelves. They were in the way. I forgot to take a Before picture but I imagine you can imagine.
Then the electrician showed up. The electrician installed all new LED lighting in the basement and tore out a bunch of ballasts that were starting to fail and, in one case, melt. It is astonishing how much friendlier the basement looks now:
(Our basement goblin isn’t completely moved out, so some of that stuff is hers.)
I should find an older picture of the basement with the old lights. My God.
We took my wife’s old desk apart and threw it out:
I built (and by “built,” I mean “put together according to the instructions”) my wife her new desk:
Cable management is coming, I promise. It’s making me twitch too. That desk is adjustable, a sitting/standing desk, which is absolutely ideal for my wife because she’s only 5’ tall. See that little panel on the right there, that you use to adjust it?
Those are the icons for “adjust to standing height” and “adjust to seating height.”
The current state of the dumpster. They’re coming to collect it tomorrow, I’m not exactly sure when:
Oh, we also threw away another old shitty end table and my old desk from when I was a kid, which we were using in the garage. I’m fully expecting the guy to complain that the desk is an inch too high for the bin and to have to cut it in half at the last minute.
Not pictured: I threw away all of my CDs— several hundred of them– which have been sitting on a shelf in the basement for fifteen years. I strongly suspect a lot of them won’t even work any longer and there isn’t a single device in the house that even plays CDs any longer other than some similarly-ancient electronics in the basement that are getting taken to e-waste tomorrow or Friday. I only discovered one CD that I didn’t have an MP3 copy of— a recording by the jazz musician ex-husband of a friend who is no longer alive— and I decided that I didn’t need to go to the trouble to find a way to rip it.
Other tasks today: I beat the bedroom 90% into submission; most things are where they are going to live now, and my leather chair and ottoman have been moved into the library, which is now a little more crowded than I like, but all three of us can sit in there at the same time now. I also reinstalled the rack for the wall shelving that we had to remove when we tore the wall down. And, somehow, more vacuuming. Apparently at some point we ran an extremely busy pet grooming business for like a year, never cleaned up any of the fur, and never noticed until this week. Also I went to the comic shop. It’s Wednesday, after all.
In other news, I am about 120 pages from the end of the 1,232 page book I’m reading, and I’m going to either finish it tonight or die. Not sure which.
Tomorrow: one last frenzy of throwing things away until they take away the dumpster, put together the new cabinet for the garage, a little bit of touch-up painting in the bedroom, install the last bits of baseboard in the bedroom, clean clean clean, organize the garage as much as we can stand, a little more work in the basement, and go visit a showroom for the next bathroom project.
Yeah. There’s another fucking bathroom project. I’ll tell you later.
Still doing stuff
Let’s start with something I didn’t do. Or, at least, I didn’t do much. I hired a man to come dig up the pole. I did not dig up the pole. I’m a job creator now!
Here is the hole:
I gave this wonderful human $120 for about an hour of work and it is the best $120 I have ever spent, because he not only dug that fucking thing out of the ground but he also beat the shit out of the concrete with a sledgehammer until it broke off the pole. Here is the pole:
You see that shit? They sunk a giant steel pole into thirty inches of concrete, triple reinforced with rebar, to hang up a wood birdhouse. The pole is also completely full of concrete after about a foot past what I had cut off. Like hell am I doing that job. That is absolutely what money is for.
Speaking of overdoing things, we used to have a workbench in the basement:
and also:
See that piece on the left? That’s a four by twelve. That’s a fucking ceiling beam, is what that is. And some crazy bastard decided to repurpose it into a workbench and absolutely overengineer everything. We were going to take the cabinets out too but my wife decided against it, so at the moment, they remain. There was also a quarter-inch thick steel plate, maybe 18” x 72”, as part of the workbench, but I didn’t get a picture of that. It’s in the bin, though!
It’s in there, I promise. You can see part of it in between the closet doors on the lower right there.
Anyway, that’s Day 2 of What I Did On My Spring Break. There are a couple more minor tasks to be done tonight but they don’t involve destruction. The garage cabinet arrived today; we might get around to throwing my wife’s old desk into the bin tonight or we might do it tomorrow. We’ll see.
We have one more full day with the bin and they come to take it away on Thursday. There is a slight chance that we might have them bring us another one. Stay tuned.
In which I’ve accomplished something
Okay, on some sort of Absolute Scale of Adulthood, successfully installing a ceiling fan at my dad’s house is probably not at or near the top of the scale. But as far as I know the damn thing is solidly installed, working properly, and isn’t going to come flying off of the walls or collapse or anything like that, and now there is both light and moving air in Dad’s kitchen again (we’re not going to talk about how long it took for this to get done, especially since it diminishes the actual achievement itself) and as far as I know the only thing that really still needs to be done is painting that patch of naked drywall up there that was underneath the original fan.
I mean, y’all, this involved wiring and everything. Wiring is scary! And I only had to go back to Lowe’s once, because I forgot to bring a wire stripper from my house and Dad didn’t have one, and Lowe’s was closer than going back to my house for mine. I thought for a few minutes that I was going to have to install a junction box but it turns out I didn’t have to, so all good there.
And then I got home and found out another former student had died, or at least that’s the rumor; the kid moved to Pennsylvania a few years ago so right now it’s all rumor mill shit and no one who I still talk to has any idea what happened. If I remember right this kid was a year ahead of Makyi’s class, and if I’m being honest I don’t remember him all that well, so it’s not hitting me nearly as hard, but … Christ, between this and everything going on in America this week the emotional whiplash has been a motherfucker and I would really like the world to calm the fuck down for a couple of weeks. It’s enough.
A brief update on the status of my wallet
We put in new carpeting last week; you know that if you’ve been around much. Since then we have decided to radically rearrange all of the public-presenting rooms of the house; the former dining room has become a reading room, the “fireplace room” that we never really settled on a name for is due to become a dining room as soon as our dining table is no longer three feet deep in books, I have a meeting tomorrow with someone about custom shelving in the living room, and another meeting with someone else about some minor renovations in the former-dining-room-now-reading-room, and tonight we went out and bought a new sofa. We got it as a three-piece, so it’s a sofa with a chaise and not the wraparound sectional that you see there, but it’s in that charcoal color and I love it.
I may need a second job.
TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The stressination
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.