Terrible decisions: not dumb yet

On January 20, 2014January 20, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

One down, four to go.

Terrible decisions: the setbackening

On January 20, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

I knew this was going to happen, but it’s still disappointing: the… rough-in valve, I think it’s called? (the plus-shaped thingy in the picture) for the new faucet and shower head does not appear to be terribly compatible with the one we have in place, so that all has to come out– and that is not, period, point-blank, no questions about it, work that I am capable of or interested in doing. So we can’t cover that wall up until we get a plumber out here, and we can’t get a plumber out here until Friday. So that somewhat limits the scale of the work we can get done today, but not in an unsatisfying way; it should still look like we got a crapton of work done by the end of the day if everything else goes well.

The new goal: get the cement board up on the two walls that don’t conceal plumbing. That’s all. And by “up,” all I mean right now is measured, cut, and screwed into the studs; while I have the proper seam tape for the cement board, I’m not even sure I plan to do that today, since I’m still sorting out what seem to be conflicting opinions on whether the joins on the cement board actually need to be separately mortared, and if they do, if they’re mortared before or after applying the tape. The dude at Lowe’s, who certainly sounded like he knew what he was doing, said that all we needed to do was tape the seams since we were tiling over it anyway and that we didn’t need to worry about joint compound; I’ve seen other sources that indicate that what we want to do is fill the seams, but what we want to use is the exact same mortar that we’ll use to install the tile. I feel like this makes one step into two steps in a way that doesn’t feel necessary, but I’ve not done enough reading to be confident yet on anything other than “definitely don’t use regular joint compound,” which is fine, because we didn’t buy any.

I’m confident on the measure/cut/screw part, which also involves a tiny bit of restudding (just adding a couple of support points for the cement board in places that are weird) and setting up a j-channel around the tub that will keep the cement board from resting on the tub. That should be enough for one day. We have to go get the boy at 4:30; that leaves us seven hours. Doable, I think. We’ll see.

There will be pictures later, of course, as I either fix things or destroy them. Or the world will be enveloped in flame. It’s a crapshoot!

Terrible Decisions: the repurchasing

On January 19, 2014January 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy7 Comments

Here’s what you’re looking at:

Six pieces of 5′ x 3′ Durock cement board;
3 1/2 gallons of Redgard;
Our new showerhead/faucet combo;
A six foot metal ruler that I plan to use as a straightedge (and, dammit, is too wide for the back of the shower, but it’ll still help to trim the Durock)
Three clean 5-gallon buckets;
A variety of painting implements and sponges and grouting tools and a notched trowel and an X-Acto knife and a few other things inside the buckets

Off-camera:

A hundred goddamn pounds, which seems crazily excessive now that I think about it but the guy insisted was the right amount for our square footage, of dry mortar;
25 pounds of grout;
An 8-foot wall stud that I need to cut to a three-foot length to give me something to attach the cement board to in a weird part of the wall;
20 feet of J-channel to set the cement board into on the tub;
Dual-sided sixteenth-inch tape to attach the J-channel to the tub;
Several hundred screws;
Several hundred spacers;
Mesh tape for the cement board;
Respirator masks, because I hear Redgard is nasty-smelling shit;
A caulk tube

Shit we forgot to buy:

A handful of wood screws to attach the aforementioned 2 x 4; we probably have some suitable ones in a drawer in the garage somewhere, though;
A caulk gun;
Some regular blue painter’s tape to tape tiles to each other while they’re setting;
Some other damn thing I can’t remember right now but hopefully either I or the wife will by the early-morning Lowe’s run tomorrow morning.

And we didn’t buy this today but:

You can see the side of our new vanity, which we had to take out of the box because we used the box for broken drywall and tile when we did the demolition;
Our new toilet (still in the box)
And a bunch of other shit that has nothing to do with the bathroom reno but is still piled up in that corner.

We’re out, like, $525 or something. And I am so gonna completely fuck up putting the walls up tomorrow. Be prepared for me to burn the house down and blame it on a spider or something.

Terrible Decisions, Stage Four: Spendin’ Money

On September 4, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

And that’s our vanity, except six inches narrower than the one we bought. For some reason, I’m super excited about the vanity; I like the way the sink slopes gently downward into the basin rather than having straight up-and-down walls– although as soon as the boy learns how much fun splashing around in that sink is going to be I’m probably going to regret it. I am… working on the faucet. This is the thing that MLW and I have most disagreed on, I think– I’m completely in love with this kind of faucet and she hates it.

Also purchased: a matching mirror. We’re also going to get a cabinet but didn’t pick it up tonight because we’re not a hundred percent certain where we want to put it yet.

Tile dude was here yesterday; we should have the estimate on the tiling in the very near future. Whee!

In other news, I got two and a half inches of grading done tonight before deciding I was done grading. I’m sending home progress reports on Friday and I need to write an Algebra test tonight, too. Instead I will probably watch a couple of hours of MasterChef and then read a book. Like I said: Whee!

Terrible Decisions, Stage Three

On September 2, 2013September 2, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

photo (1)

What I have learned about myself today: sometimes, when I’m trying to measure something, even if I’m being careful, I can somehow suddenly end up being off by two entire inches for no clear reason at all, and then can add 3 to 56, get 59, but get off another inch as I’m trying to measure those three inches. I’m not sure how these things happen. It’s possible that I’m dumb! But if I’m dumb I’m at least dumb enough that I caught it and fixed it (pay attention to black, not orange) before it mattered to anyone.

Note that “before it mattered to anyone” technically means “ever,” since those walls that I’ve written on are getting torn down and then an actual professional is doing the tiling. But it occurred to us that we ought probably to have a real idea of how we were going to put the tile on the wall before we start paying some dude to come over and do it for us– since, again, I cannot be trusted.

The actual tiles are at the bottom of the post. We’re using the white glossy ceramic with the greyish-blue marbling as the main shower tile, and it’s going almost all the way up the wall, to where you can see the little black line with the arrows on it– or, possibly, a bit above that, if we add a row of narrower beveled tiles above the bigger ones. The actual tiles are the same style as the one in the picture but are 10″ x 14″. We’ll probably put a row of those smaller ones on the outside row just to make it look less abrupt– much like the current tub does.

The bulkhead you see there is going to be gone, and we’re putting in a new ceiling fan powered by the tears of children. We’re not planning on tiling the shower ceiling; that’ll all be paint, although we haven’t settled on a color yet. Still working on that.

The black line with the wavy bit in it is going to be accent tile– the glass tile you see down below, cut into four rows so that each section of tile actually gets us four feet of the accent row. We may or may not use more of it as a little backsplash between the vanity and the mirror; we haven’t gotten that far yet and aren’t sure how it’ll look in the end. The third, darker tile is the floor– we bailed on the cork idea once we determined that we absolutely had no choice but to retile the shower surround; if we’re paying a professional to come in anyway we may as well lay tile on the floor. I still like the cork idea but this is less risky. The orange wavy parts are slightly-mismeasured other ideas about where to put the accent row; I think the black is the actual final decision, although it’ll end up being off by a tiny bit since I didn’t bother to account for 1/8 of an inch or so of grout between each of the tiles. It’s slightly above my eye level, which is about where I wanted it, and is high enough that it’s unlikely that it’s going to get a lot of water splashed on it (since this’ll be a high-grout area) which was what my lovely wife wanted. Plus at that height we don’t have to have any of the bigger tiles cut to put it there– it’ll slide in nicely between, if I remember right, the third and fourth row.

I may push for floor heating, since the actual floor space in the room is so small I can’t imagine it’ll cost much. Don’t tell my wife yet.(*)

(Oh, hey, wait! I looked it up and it’s not that expensive for a small area. Hmm.)

At any rate, the next step is to wait for Installer Dude to come by and measure everything for reals, which is happening… tomorrow, I think? And then we actually buy all the tile and break a bunch of shit and possibly need a plumber for behind the wall (I’m crossing my fingers that this doesn’t happen) and then do some cement boarding and then bring him back to actually do the tiling work. Or maybe we do that even before we schedule him to come back; I dunno, but we decided that we weren’t breaking anything until he’d measured and we had a sense of what sort of lead time they needed to schedule the job.

I’m looking forward to the “breaking stuff” phase. We were gonna do that this weekend but ended up deciding it was stupid timing. No use destroying the bathroom before it’s necessary, right? Sure.

Enjoy what’s left of your Labor Day weekend, folks. And thank a union member for making sure you have days off at all. Or, better yet, become one.

(*) Of course she reads this. You still don’t get to tell her.

Terrible Decisions, Stage Two

On August 24, 2013August 24, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

We started off so well. If you’ve noticed my Instagram feed over there, there’s a picture of a bunch of boxes containing my new toilet, my new tub, and my new tub surround. We’d gotten a bunch of flooring samples from a place online and had narrowed our flooring choices down to two possibilities, one light and one dark. We’d found a vanity or two we liked, and a store that would let us custom-design basically whatever the hell we wanted without blowing our budget up too goddamn much.

Then my father-in-law came over. You remember my father-in-law the general contractor, right? The guy who gave my brother a heart attack when, ten seconds after arriving at the Great Redeckening, he pronounced our wood incorrect?

Yeah. That guy.

“That tub’s not going to work,” he says. Which means the surround isn’t going to work. And I am now very angry– not at him, because he’s right, and more importantly he’s right well before we started destroying our tub or taking things out of boxes and he’s right while we can still take stuff back. I’m angry because I shoulda noticed this shit on my own and I didn’t.

60 inches is basically standard for a tub nowadays, right? I had measured our tub and it had come out to 58 inches from tile to tile– which, I reasoned, given that there was a layer of tile and, underneath that, a layer of drywall, meant that there was certainly going to be sixty inches from stud to stud. The new surround attaches directly to the studs, so all of that stuff was going to come out and then the tub would fit.

Take a real close look at that picture there and see if you can figure out what’s wrong. Go ahead; I’ll wait. No, not the rotten drywall and the mold. We knew about that already; that’s the problem we were going to fix with the new tub and new surround. We discovered the leak when the wallpaper back there started turning black– it’s close to the floor in between the tub and the toilet, though, so it was easy to ignore. Then the drywall started disintegrating. I ripped some of it out to try and figure out how bad it was; it’s actually not very moldy– the black is all on the surface and the wood itself is still, mostly, solid. The white thing on the left is a guard that we put in that (I thought at the time) would stop the leak– I thought water was just running along the edge of the tub and hitting the drywall. No, as it turns out, it’s behind the tile, as we discovered when we pulled one of the tiles out and ran some water. The leak’s not in the tub at all.

But forget about that. Look at the tub, and then look at the wall stud above it. See a problem?

The tub extends a good inch underneath the studs. These fuckers who built this house put the tub in before they even studded the wall, and then built a bloody header over the top of the thing. Which means that any sixty inch tub that expects to have a surround around it is going to be wider than the bathroom is. It’s impossible to put any other modern sixty inch tub in there without moving fucking walls around, and that’s not a level of work that we’re willing to commit to at this time.

My father-in-law figured all this out at a glance.

We have to keep the tub, but we’re still going to have to rip out the tile. There was a brief flirtation with 54″ tubs, but after looking around a bit we decided against that idea on account of they’re all crap. What we’re going to have to do is pull out all the existing tile, pull out all the drywall behind it (which is going to be mostly rotten and moldy at this point anyway), then redrywall (hopefully with a thinner board than they’re using) and retile over that. Tiling is beyond my skill level, so we’ll have to hire someone for it, which is probably gonna blow up our budget– although we’ll make a tiny bit of it back by not having to buy a new tub, I doubt we’ll get anybody to come out and do the new tile work for less than the tub would have cost– although I’ll admit I haven’t really looked into it much so maybe I’ll get lucky.

Also, so much for getting all this done by next weekend. Don’t think so. Sigh.

Terrible Decisions, Stage One

On August 18, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

ku-xlarge

Today, we start work (well, sorta) on our next home improvement project: destroying our larger bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak. (After that? Destroying our smaller bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak.) The bathroom has forced us into a cascade situation, where each thing we want to replace has forced us to replace another thing, until finally we’re gutting everything but the walls. And we may still need to pull those down, depending on how successful we are at getting the previous owners’ wallpaper down. I’m guessing we’ll need to drywall. We definitely need to kill an unnecessary bulkhead over the tub, so there’s gonna be some drywalling no matter what; we’ll see if we have to do everything.

The budget is $2500 and I’m betting we can come in at 70% of that– it’s a small bathroom, and we don’t exactly have extravagant tastes. Today’s project is to locate flooring; we’re thinking hard about cork tile and are going to bring the grandparents over to babysit while we hit a bunch of kitchen and bath stores in the area and see what they have available. If you happened to notice the Instagram picture of the tile floating in a bowl of water from the other day, I bought a bunch of samples home from Lowe’s and spent an afternoon trying to destroy them. I’m sufficiently satisfied with cork’s resilience to be willing to use it in the bathroom, especially since we’re planning on glue-down and not snap-together tiling. It should be manageable.

The bulk of the work, right now, is slated to be done over Labor Day weekend, which is– gulp– just a couple of weeks away. We’ve got a bunch of basic decisions made (picked out the tub, the toilet, a new ceiling fan, etc, although we still need a vanity and we haven’t bought anything yet– we probably ought to spend some money today, though, since the stuff probably isn’t going to show up immediately) but there’s still a fair amount of work to be done before we can start actually doing any work. And then all of you get to look forward to the blog post where I describe how I destroyed my entire house while trying to install a toilet.

Whee!

Things I want to learn

On July 23, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Uncategorized1 Comment

Had to cancel another ukulele appointment yesterday; it’s been two weeks since the first one, which is still the only one I’ve been to. Other things keep intervening on both our parts. I’m practicing occasionally but not really committing to it. Still can’t handle that whole three-finger-chord thing. I suspect when I topped out at Medium difficulty on Guitar Hero and Rock Band that was life telling me that I was never going to be any good at playing stringed instruments.

That said, it got me thinking about what other shit I was terrible at that I didn’t want to be terrible at any more. Here’s a partial list. Add your own!

Cooking. I’m actually making great progress on this so far this year, as shown by the fact that half of my posts are about something I made. But I want to be better. I’m still doing pretty well for someone who could barely boil things at the beginning of 2013. My next target is going to be chicken paprikash; sometime in the next couple of days. In the meantime I need to find some hot paprika.
I have failed at learning two academic things in my life. The first is calculus, which I dropped out of about 2/3 of the way through my senior year when I realized that a) I didn’t need it to graduate; b) I was already admitted to and scholarshipped at my school of choice, and c) I was a goddamn second-semester senior and screw calculus. I took no math whatsoever in college, unless statistics count, and I loved both of the statistics courses I’ve taken– I tested out of all of the requirements my college had. But I would like, as a grown-up, to have at least a vague understanding of what calculus is about and how it works. There is a course on my iPad. I’ve never opened it.
The second thing is Arabic, which I made the mistake of taking my first semester of my freshman year in college, and I wasn’t prepared for it so I dropped it. I’ve learned Hebrew since then so I know I can handle non-European scripts. There’s a course for this on my iPad too. I don’t even necessarily want to learn to speak or understand it; I just want to be able to read and write in it. I can still read (pointed) Hebrew, if slowly, despite the thirteen years that have passed since I had any formal instruction, so I figure once I’ve learned it it isn’t going to go away.
The building trades. I could make this four bullets if I wanted to, but I gotta leave for work in a few minutes. In no particular order: Carpentry, plumbing, electrician…ing, and enough basic mechanical engineering that I feel like I know my way around an engine. I’d like to know enough to be able to wire up a lamp to a switch or build a bookshelf or replace drywall or fix a spark plug or trade out a toilet without screwing it up. It’s entirely possible that I’m already capable of these things if I take my time and am careful about it, but I’d like to know enough to know that what I’m about to do isn’t going to work, rather than my usual method of repeatedly screwing up until I get it right. I’m not completely clueless; I managed to install a new radio in my current car without electrocuting myself, but still. Better is the metric here.
Botany. There’s a bunch of goddamn plants in my back yard; I wanna know what they are.
Music, specifically ukulele and harmonica, and whatever music theory knowledge is required to be able to competently handle those two instruments. I have a story that I need to remember to tell you about going to Guitar City yesterday. I very nearly did something bad.

I’m sure there’s more; I’ll edit if something obvious comes up. What do you want to know about that you don’t?