Tag: renovation

In which we are not making progress

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Don’t tell anybody, because I’ll deny it, but if school started tomorrow, other than needing maybe half an hour to clean up a few things and put some stuff away, my room is ready to go. It’s not finished, mind you, but it’s the kind of unfinished where if someone who wasn’t me walked in, they wouldn’t be able to tell. No one is going to look in an empty corner and go “Weren’t you planning on putting your hex lights there?”

I have two more days this week before teachers are officially back on Monday. All good. Time for something to go terribly wrong, in fact.

The problem is, the whole rest of the building is not me, and I just realized today how much trouble the rest of the building is in. There were a lot more teachers back today, and … yeah. There are a bunch of things that absolutely must be finished in a week in order to open school, and … I have my doubts. And from what I’m hearing, although this is entirely hearsay, the other middle schools are worse off than we are.

There are no functioning student bathrooms in the building, for example. The bathrooms were all completely gutted over the summer, and the sinks are in but there are no toilets or urinals, nor are there any partitions, because you need the toilets in place before you put in toilet stalls. You literally cannot open a school if none of the hundreds of students who go there have anywhere to pee. Na Ga Ha Pen. And that’s before we get to things like none of the new reconfigured classrooms have cabinets or countertops yet. Like, you can have a classroom without those things? But it’s a big pain in the ass.

Our band and orchestra rooms are not remotely functional yet; I’m not sure about the details because I haven’t seen them. But what I did see is that when they moved all of the stuff out of those rooms– and you can imagine just how much stuff is packed into your average middle school band and orchestra room– they Tetrised everything into one of our social studies classrooms. And I chose that word on purpose, because there is no room in her classroom. All of her desks are triple-stacked on top of each other against the wall farthest from the door. There was a narrow path to her desk, but you can’t do a whole damn lot to get ready in a classroom that is completely full of shit.

There are a bunch of teachers changing classrooms this year, too, and for a lot of them one of the two rooms isn’t ready yet, so none of them can go anywhere, and …

I wouldn’t be completely surprised if the middle schools have the start of school backed up by a couple of days, is what I’m saying. We can’t even do e-learning days, because none of the kids have their devices yet. We can find temporary workarounds for the classrooms– worst case, we have a lot of kids in the gym and in the library for the first few days of school, and it’s whatever; we’re annoyed but it’s manageable. But if there are any more delays to the bathrooms, we’ve got a major Goddamn problem on our hands.

Spring Cleaning

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

So, do you know what happens when you renovate a bathroom, and said bathroom backs onto your bedroom?

Okay, a lot of things; that question could have been a bit more specific. The biggest one, though? Dust. Oh, my God, so much fucking dust.

But the bathroom is oh so very nearly done, and what’s left to do isn’t going to generate any more dust, or at least isn’t going to generate any more dust that makes it into the bedroom.

So today I put all my laundry away, wen through my clothes for Goodwill donations, took all the boxes that came out of what used to be a closet and is now our shower and put everything back into its new location, dusted every Goddamn horizontal surface in the bedroom, dusted all the furniture, swept, vacuumed, moved most of the furniture (the bed will be a day all by itself, and I’m not touching the bookshelves) and vacuumed under that, then mopped probably 60% of the floor, with the 40% unmopped being the area under and around the bed.

Now it’s raining and the bedroom looks much better and I have game recording to do, I guess, because YouTube is still happening, so go subscribe.

The end.

And Now: The Continuation of TERRIBLE DECISIONS

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Compared to the staggering changes yesterday, when the whole bathroom got torn down to the studs, the progression today doesn’t seem too extensive, but they basically got a ton of stuff done that involved precise measuring and cutting. I didn’t get pictures of everything, because junction boxes and power switches and GCFI outlets aren’t really all that interesting, but here’s the shower:

The new back wall, formerly the closet, is properly studded out now and the niche is in place, along with the curb and the shower drain. The little extra bit in the niche is the middle shelf and just isn’t in place yet. This also involved a fair amount of fuckery in our utterly unacceptable crawlspace so it was a hell of a job. The last bits of tile on the floor from the flooring before the linoleum we had are also gone. There’s also a ton of new studding in other places where they wanted to augment the preexisting wood a bit. Here’s the other side of the shower:

The copper pipes at the very bottom are preexisting; the PEX pipe, the fittings, and the shower hardware are all, obviously, new.

Tomorrow, the electrical gets finished up, the rest of the shower hardware goes in place, and they’ll start putting up drywall. We’ve been told that this is the last night that we’ll have a freezing cold bedroom, which honestly is disappointing, because last night might have been the best night of sleep of my entire fucking life. There’s nothing I love more than sleeping in a cold bedroom.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The Return

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

…we never really finished the first bathroom renovation, so to hell with it, let’s start on the second one. Only we’ve hired professionals to do it this time! And demo starts tomorrow! Let’s take a look at what we’re wrecking:

Bek and I removed the giant mirror that was on the wall in front of the heinous green wallpaper, because that’s going to go into the basement, but I think you can manage to imagine a mirror. That patch of unwallpapered wall next to the medicine cabinet was there when we moved in (did they move the medicine cabinet over a couple feet? Replace it? We’ll never know); the torn patch of wallpaper next to it was me, trying to figure out what was behind it (and deciding it was way too much of a pain in the ass to remove). The holes in the wall were made tonight, just for the hell of it. All of this is gone tomorrow. All of it.

This closet is actually in our bedroom, and it’s not going to be a closet anymore as of tomorrow. We are eating this space to expand the shower …

…because this is the existing shower, and there’s been a leak in it somewhere since we moved in, so it literally hasn’t been used in years. This is going to get much bigger and have a bench, a rainfall shower head and a regular one, and a few other bits of coolness. But the kicker? The thing I’m looking forward to the most about this entire process? My wife let me order this tonight.

Yep. That’s right, motherfuckers: I just spent over a thousand dollars on a bidet. It has a remote control.

My asshole is going to be immaculate.

Start looking forward to the review right now. Because there is going to be a review.

I have to get up early tomorrow so that I’m ready for the construction guys, and I don’t even mind.

Nattering on

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I’m in a mood again today, and I think it’s social media related; I need to spend less time on … well, everything, really. I’ve done a reasonable amount of adulting today; I rescheduled a doctor’s appointment, made my first dentist’s appointment since before the pandemic (letting people stick their fingers in my mouth before I was vaccinated was not happening) and got some more planning done for next year. I also finished my first bookbinding project, which I was going to share with you but I think I’ll wait until I finish the second one instead. All I can see when I look at this one are the mistakes, so I’m going to give it to my son and make a better one for my wife, which hopefully will be something I’m actually willing to share with people.

You’d think this would have me in a decent headspace, but I just can’t deal with the level of stupid the world is throwing at me today:

I also sat down with the estimate I just got from the fixtures place for our bathroom renovation, and compared it to our initial estimate, which was supposedly based on average prices at that specific location, and I’m going to have to have a stern word with someone about it, because right now we are astronomically over budget, before a single square inch of drywall gets pulled off the wall or a single tile gets laid. To a certain degree I’m willing to blame myself for not paying attention to certain things– like the fact that a shower door wasn’t included in the original estimate, when in fact what I was told was a very basic shower door at this place is thirteen hundred dollars, and a shower door is not exactly an unexpected purchase when redoing a bathroom. But when you tell us that your estimate for the vanity will cover a “custom” vanity for the space, and we in fact pick out a pre-built, non custom vanity, and the vanity still runs three times the estimate? That’s on you. When we are specific across the board that we are looking for mid-range stuff, and we ask you to quote us out for mid-range stuff, and then they show us what they are saying is mid-range stuff, and the estimate is off two hundred percent? I am not taking all the blame for that shit.

So first I have to go over all this with my wife to figure out just how deep in the shit we are, and how much we can afford to crawl out of said shit, and then I need to call my guy who put this estimate together and we’re gonna have us a come to Jesus moment.

So, yeah. I’m in a mood.

GOD DAMN YOU FOUR TILES

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

photo-6

The accent tile has got to be completely dry before I can put a tile above it, or it crushes the mesh and shoves them together.  

The accent tile is not dry.  It’ll take another hour before I’m comfortable.

My mortar is not going to last another hour, and I’m out of mortar.  As it is 8 PM on a Sunday, I cannot acquire more mortar at this time.

Which means it’s going to take ANOTHER GODDAMN DAY TO GET MY TILE DONE.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGHHHHHHH.

(There’s a weird optical illusion on the left side of the image, where it looks like some of the tiles are either totally the wrong size or cut in weird places.  Not the case.  it’s the reflection of the grout lines on the tile on the side facing the shower faucet.)

Terrible Decisions: So far so good

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

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The left wall is completed except for the bullnose edge, which is going to be a piece of cake, and the larger middle wall is well along its way– the gap in between it and the walls on the left and right are all tiles that have to be cut to size.  We are figuring that we’ll spend the evening after the boy goes to bed cutting tiles and then we’ll actually finish the job later this week.  I hung nineteen tiles today, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but shit, I’m exhausted.  Bek has been trying to cut the tile, which is turning out to be hellishly complicated, and we’ve each ruined a couple of them trying to get it done right.

One more day ought to do it, though.

Terrible Decisions: oh shut up

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

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Yes, these 12 tiles and one row of mosaic represent a day’s work. Mostly because my wife spent about ten hours carefully measuring and marking everything off with lines that I proceeded to mostly ignore or treat as vague suggestions while actually tiling. We discovered the hard way, but before doing actual damage, that you can’t put a full tile that size over mosaic until the mosaic is fully dry, which is why the area above the mosaic looks mopped down: it was.

More Saturday, I think.