Tag: home renovation

Still going

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

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

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

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

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

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

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life1 Comment

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

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

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.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: We have a bathroom, almost

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

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.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Weight off my shoulders edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

…before you read this post, I’d like you to read this one. You’ll be casting yourselves almost exactly eight years into the past. You will note that the post involves renovating a bathroom. I don’t know if there are any of you still reading this blog who were here way back then, when we decided to renovate the hallway bathroom and to do it ourselves. All of the recent Terrible Decisions posts have been regarding the master bathroom, and of course we have hired other people to do all of the work.

You will note that that post involves installing the ceiling fan, and that I mention bringing my general contractor father-in-law in to do the job because I was convinced that at some point during the process I would put my foot in the wrong place and either break myself or bust a hole in the ceiling.

At some point after finishing that installation– you can see it there, and it looks nice and clean, and I have other pictures from around then that show the outer cover of the fan put in place, too– my father-in-law, who I love dearly, put his fucking foot in the wrong place and busted a hole in the ceiling.

Amazingly, I never appear to have posted about it, possibly out of a desire to not be seen as making fun of somebody who was genuinely trying to help us out. Even more amazingly, I don’t have a picture of the busted-ass broke-ass held-in-place-by-cement-board-tape bullshit that has been sitting next to my ceiling fan for eight fucking years and, ultimately, halted all work on the Goddamned bathroom because we weren’t sure what to do with it between the metal joists in the ceiling, the plaster getting in the way of a clean repair, a couple of other things, and the sort of inertia that can set in on home improvement projects where eventually you hit “eh, good enough,” and because you live with it you learn to ignore the fucking ridiculousness.

(I really don’t want to be writing this post, if I’m being honest, because I’m so ashamed of this nonsense. I am genuinely hoping that I can say “you know how it is,” and that many of you will, in fact, Know how It Is.)

I swear to you that at the beginning of every single break from school and honestly at least a third of the weekends since late December of 2013, I have looked at that fucking hole and sworn to myself that this time, this time, this would be the weekend or the break where I finally fixed that motherfucking hole.

And … well, let’s say it’s half done:

The actual hole was in the place where all the plaster is broken, and it was still holding in place on the left side where the marker is and just sort of out of place out toward the back where it’s obviously been cut. I thought I had a picture of the actual mess itself (my wife probably does but she’s not home) but somehow, again, I never took one. And after eight years of waiting and no more than an hour of actual work:

It’s not perfect but it’s a shitton better, and once there’s tape and mud on it it’ll be fine. I’m not taping and mudding today. I probably should push through and get it done but it’s already 5:00 somehow and I have shit to do tonight. I have the mud already, though, so I can get it done this week.

Frankly if I get it done before 2030 at this point I think I can say I was on the ball.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Shower tile!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am so Goddamn happy at how good this looks:

A good look at three of the four major design decisions we made, although you can’t see the wall color in this one. I’m ecstatic. I was not prepared for how the accent tile was going to look like a waterfall coming down from the shower mechanicals. I love it.

(We did go with the white grout. Black grout will be done tomorrow, and then all we have is to put the actual hardware in and the shower door.)

You get a llttle bit of the look of the ceiling color here, and a better look at the accent tile.

The shower niche, with a better look at the white grout and the different shelf that the tile guy recommended; I think it was the right call. God, this is gonna look so good when it’s all cleaned up and the black grout is in.

I think the grouting is the only thing that’ll happen tomorrow; I can’t believe they’re coming out on a Sunday and on New Year’s Day, but they’re gonna. I may or may not post more pictures depending on how stark the difference is.

(Possibly still one more post coming today, believe it or not.)