Tag: renovation

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

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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.

Terrible Decisions: The Hard Part

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

Okay.

I’m tiling my bathtub surround today.

I can do this.

No one is going to die.

I am not going to fuck up.

I will still have two bathrooms at the end of the day.

I’m good enough, and I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

Expect pictures and swearing as the day goes on.

The most important thing you’re going to read all day

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek4 Comments

JellyBellyBeansLet’s talk about jelly beans.

You may recall from a couple of days ago that we just coated the tub surround in RedGard.  This is a waterproofing membrane; it goes on like paint although it has a slightly thicker consistency, and dries to a rubbery membrane.  It’s supposed to be put on at a certain thickness to be effective; we lack the tool (a wet film thickness gauge) to properly determine how thick the RedGard is going on the wall and thus have been using “paint it until you can’t see the words anymore” as a handy Internet-suggested shorthand.

Six fuckin’ coats of this Pepto-Bismol lookin’ shit later, I’m ready to say fuck what the internet thinks and that this has got to be thick enough by now.  Take a look at the size of the bucket in the middle picture, here.  That bucket’s almost empty and every bit of that shit’s on the walls right now.  The tub’s not that goddamn big; hell, I’ll do the math if I need to to figure out how thick it probably is.

(Hmm.  Maybe I should just do the math…)

(Just not right now.)

Anyway.  Jellybeans.  There’s an Ace Hardware near our house; we tend to try and frequent them whenever we have any sort of tool/hardware/home improvement needs because hey, local business, and also because they tend to have employees who know what the hell they’re talking about and are nice about finding out if they don’t know.

We’ve had to go to Ace a lot lately because this stuff is waterproofing material and thus doesn’t really do being rinsed out of brushes very well.  And we keep having to add surprise coats, thus two or three trips to Ace in just a few days to buy more brushes and rollers.

Our local Ace Hardware keeps a giant rack of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans right by the cash register.

They are demons, Ace Hardware.  Demons, I tell you.  Because the Jelly Bellies… I cannot resist them.  And so every trip I have made to Ace Hardware for the last several days has led to me scarfing a bag of jelly beans on the way home, because why the hell would I try and wait until I was actually home?  Who does that?

Anyway, on the way home on the most recent trip it hit me that jelly beans are really the perfect food of the future.  I don’t know what kind of Nazi-inspired demon-magic taste thaumaturgy goes into these fuckers, but any time you hand me a little nugget of gelatin small enough to fit in my nose and I eat it and I can taste every individual element of the best cheeseburger I’ve ever had in my life, you have either solved all of the world’s problems or doomed it; I’m not sure which.

Next task is to figure out how to pack a day’s worth of nutrition into one of these little bastards and once you do that I swear I’ll never eat anything else ever again, I promise.  Food pill, Jelly Belly people.  Get on that.

Terrible Decisions: the rebeginninging

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Gonna spend the day smearing mortar on stuff.

Take bets in comments on how bad I’mma screw this up.

Pictures later, probably of a bathroom on fire.

Terrible Decisions: the plumberation

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

photoOrrighty then.  Plumber’s been here, and the new hardware for the new faucet is installed and ready to be cement-boarded back out of existence.  And at a fairly reasonable cost, too, especially since everything I saw him do convinced me that there’s no way I had any business trying to get that done myself.

I kinda wish it wasn’t a two-person job to cut the cement board accurately or I’d try getting that done today, since I’m home from work on account of Polar Vortex again.

I’m planning on working on Benevolence Archives all day today, so if you’ve been following that you can look forward to an update this afternoon or early evening sometime.