They took the precious away today, so I can no longer arbitrarily choose to throw away any object I own. It’s very sad for all of us. There has been a distinct slowdown in the pace of work around the house today, very likely due to both of us finally and thoroughly running out of steam. I did manage a couple of projects, though: I cleared all of the books from my Chicago classroom library out of the basement, some to the dumpster and some to donation and a small number that will be brought to my classroom on Monday. And we put this together:
Bek got some touch-up painting done in the bedroom, too. We still have baseboard to deal with, plus making the garage usable again (mostly an organization/putting everything away project; that cabinet is currently empty) and installing a couple of things in the basement, plus restoring the basement to its former glory as a mostly-unused workout room. The bedroom’s not quite 100% yet either. It’s 5:30 right now; we had an appointment at 3:00 that took an hour and a half or so; I’m hoping that one of those projects gets done by the end of the day. Just one more today will be enough.
Maybe one more update tomorrow. I have a couple of reviews I’ve been sitting on that need to get written, and sooner or later I’m going to have to admit that I’m going back to work in a few days. For right now, the PS5 is calling for the first time in a little while, and I’m going to answer it.
The very first thing we did was pull down the cabinets in the garage, revealing pristine pegboard behind them:
I was fully convinced that there was going to be a massive hole and perhaps a live possum behind those cabinets, so the fact that it ended up being more usable pegboard is a huge plus. We tossed the cabinets into the bin and then threw out a bunch of stuff from the garage and the back yard that has been sitting around for way too long, plus an ancient end table from inside the house that we’ll be replacing soon. Then we ordered a garage cabinet from Lowe’s that will be here tomorrow. Among the things we threw away: a roof rake that we inherited from my in-laws easily ten years ago if not longer that has never been out of the box it came in. My wife, who I love dearly, tried to keep it. We just had fourteen feet of snow and felt no need to rake the roof. We’re never using that Goddamn thing.
I have been told that she will very much enjoy the I Told You So moment if it comes next winter. Me, I’ll just buy a new fucking roof rake. (I won’t. This will never happen. I find the entire concept of roof rakes ridiculous.)
Then we tried to cut the post down again:
You may notice that it looks shorter than last time. The reason is I tried to cut it off at ground level using the same reciprocating saw and a new saw blade and it absolutely would not bite, so I tried again from higher up, taking off a foot and a half or so more, and it cut through clean just like it did last time. At this point what’s left is full of twigs and soil and, we’re pretty sure, at least one dead baby bird, and I’m pretty sure the bottom six inches or so is full of concrete, which is why my saw wouldn’t cut through it. I refuse to dig out whatever blob of concrete this thing got sunk into, so I threw a post up on Craigslist offering $100 for anyone who wants to come tear this thing out of my lawn and got six responses within ten minutes, so we have a guy coming over tomorrow to do that. If he flakes, we have five more in line, so somebody is going to do it. Just not me.
Then it was time for the bedroom. Which is much bigger than it looks in this picture, our bed is just huge. There’s also plenty of space behind me, which is where the bed used to be.
The order of operations:
Strip the bed.
Pull the made-of-fucking-neutronium mattress off the bed and lean it up against the wall somewhere. This was easily the hardest part of the job.
Lift the metal frame off from around the mattress and base, Tetris it across the room into its new location. Get the chair that was sitting in the corner being in the way out of the way.
Shove the adjustable base, also heavy as fuck, into its new location, lifting the frame up and out of the way to slide the base underneath it.
Wash and clean the floor. Wonder how we have been living in the immense amount of filth that was under our bed. Discover things that should not have been under there.
Move the dresser from its old location (where the bookshelves are in this picture) to its new location to the right of where I’m standing while I’m taking the picture.
Take all the books off both bookshelves, move the bookshelves. Resolve to throw one of them away as soon as possible since it’s falling apart.
Look around for a bookshelf solution; Ikea is getting so much money from me in the near future, but nothing has been ordered just yet.
Order two new nightstands that are more functional than the ones we have; they’ll be here Wednesday.
Put most of the books back. Throw some away and put some in a box for Goodwill or whoever takes old books that nobody wants.
Clean the floor again a few more times.
Upon the wife’s declaration that we’re hiring someone to redo our closet (behind me) soon, tear the old doors off the closet and throw them into the dumpster.
Holy fucking Christ how do we live like this???? Vacuum the shit out of the floor— again— and the old tracks for the closet doors. The closet doors were almost never closed anyway, so seeing our clothes inside the closet isn’t that big of a deal.
Meanwhile, while I was tearing down closet doors:
See that wooden trellis, back against the fence? Bek tore that down. We still need to fix the fence. That’s on the list for tomorrow, along with starting work in the basement, possibly putting the rest of the shelving back on the wall in the bedroom, and watching as someone takes five minutes to tear that post out and still gets a hundred dollars of money from me because I don’t want to do it. Also, I have a dentist appointment, scheduled before I knew about all this shit.
That slight pinkish hueis how we know that the drywall compound hasn’t finished drying yet; this needs another sanding before it’s ready to paint, but considering how it looked a couple of weeks ago this represents significant improvement. We meant to get this done last weekend but neither of us were feeling well so it got put off to yesterday and today; I capped off that loose wire and stuck it into a box (It meets code now! It’s even straight and flush to the wall!) and we both pitched in on the sanding. Bek did the mudding. Hopefully next weekend we’ll get to throw some furniture around, and then there’s a dumpster coming for the first few days of Spring Break, during which I will have to be restrained from throwing away everything we own. Do we need a dining table? The oven? Come on, let’s just put ’em in the dumpster.
Seriously, we have like half a dozen projects planned for Spring Break (most of them involve destroying stuff, which is exciting!) plus a handful of contractors and other specialists coming out to either take care of other things we’re not smart enough for or give us estimates for them. If we get more than half of the shit we’re thinking about taken care of it’s going to be a very successful Spring Break.
My other project today was … filling a hole in front of the house, which may be a post all on its own. I never realized that it was possible to be bad at filling in a hole, or to fill in a hole incorrectly, but I appear to have done both of those things. One way or another the current phase of the Fill The God Damn Hole project is complete; the only question is whether we need to move to Fill The God Damn Hole, Phase 3: In Which I Learn to Pour Concrete, Because Fuck This.
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.
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.
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.
…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.
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:
ORBITS: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) asks whether the Forest Service or the BLM can alter the orbit of the moon or the Earth in order to fight climate change during a House Natural Resources hearing pic.twitter.com/yYiOyi2cMZ
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.
