Tag: home renovation

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: We have a bathroom, almost

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

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!

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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.)

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Almost there

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Substantial progress in the last couple of days:

A good look at the flooring, which is completely installed, and the wall color, which is a light grey. I love how this turned out. Love it.

This is the shower, which gets tiled tomorrow, and the fan/lighting sconce overhead. Nice and simple.

The niche and the bench. We’re using a different shelf than the one that’s sitting in there; it’s got holes in it for drainage and is considerably thinner.

The hardwood in the bedroom is a freaking mess, but I love that the transition pieces match the flooring. I don’t know if I should have expected this but I love it as a little detail.

And the first parts of the tile are in! This literally just happened; it was the last of the work for today as this needs to set before they can tile the rest of the shower tomorrow. The wall tiles will be a lot bigger, with an accent stripe going underneath all the shower hardware and more accent tile inside the niche. The grout here will be black; we were going to go with black everywhere but the tile guy thinks it has a good chance of bleeding into the accent tile, which is more the color of the floor, so we might go with white there.

The rest of the shower gets tiled tomorrow, and then all that’s left is trim, the toilet and bidet, the vanity, the closet, the hangers and shelving, grout, and finishing up the last details on the electric. Oh, and the shower door. That’s kind of important. I think they’re planning on working through the weekend, so we should be done Tuesday or Wednesday. I cannot wait to see what the shower looks like.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Drywall Edition

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Walls! A ceiling! Relatively boring pictures!

There’s no light in the room any more other than the spots they’ve got set up, but you get the idea. Drywall!

The shower walls are up too, and man, does it look enormous. My wife’s idea to eat the closet was absolutely the right call. There’s still going to be a bench going in here on the right side, but even once that’s in place there’s still a ton more room.

And the most important arrival of the day: the bidet is here! It’s still in a box. I could show you a picture of the box, but it’s just a cardboard shipping box. Not super exciting.

I don’t know if they’re working tomorrow yet– one guy is still here, doing something up in the attic, so I’ll ask him before he leaves– so there may not be any updates until after Christmas. If they do more tomorrow, I’ll update again, of course.

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 right 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 prefaced 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.)