TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The Destructioning

On December 20, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am in a hurry, as something that I thought was at 6:30 is at 6:00 and I need to buy a card and a gift between now and then, so have some pictures, which I don’t think need a whole lot of context anyway:

What was behind the weird patched part of the wall? An unused junction box!

Broken tile!

Broken all sorts of stuff!

They were not prepared for the amount of insulation we have in the attic. Apparently this was “chest-deep” a few minutes before I went to investigate all the coughing. Sorry about the lung cancer, guys.

You can get an idea of how deep the blown-in was from this picture. We’ll have to reinsulate once the new ceiling goes in, but that’s the biggest problem we’ve encountered so far.

You can see from the dots on the wall (paint, sprayed through the pegboard) where the old closet was. The new shower is going to be nice.

Probably no pictures tomorrow, as they’re just doing electrical and some plumbing, but we’ll see.

Lights!

On June 4, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

This is as exciting as my day got– picking out the lighting for the bathroom remodel. That’s what they look like; bask in its room-lighty glory. Or not; we didn’t exactly go super-complicated on this particular decision. I suppose we also picked out a bathroom exhaust fan, but seeing as how the entire decision-making process for that was to authorize whatever our contractor had already suggested, and I couldn’t pick the one we chose out of a lineup if my life depended on it, it didn’t count for much.

My criteria for the lights: 1) brushed nickel, to match everything else in the room; 2) smoked glass so that I’m not staring at bare lightbulbs, and 3) facing downwards to make the bulbs easier to change. My wife argued with none of these determinations and I more or less went “Okay, whatever you want” beyond that. I think we’ve been surprising the people at these places with how quickly and easily we’ve been able to make decisions throughout this process, although I did horrify the saleslady at the fixtures place a couple of weeks ago by abruptly snarling at my wife about something or another; Bek knew exactly what I was doing and laughed about it, but the saleslady clearly thought I had decided to die on the hill of refusing to have oval-shaped pulls on the vanity or whatever it was that I’d complained about, and you could see her bracing herself to be an unwitting bystander in Marital Drama.

I suspect these people probably have a touch of PTSD, and I don’t blame them for it; we probably ought to just get along in public and not make jokes. I will do better in the future.

There’s not much more to report here, really; I planned for the first couple of days of summer break to be low-activity and I’ve successfully achieved that. Tomorrow we are heading to Illinois to finally meet my new nephew, so expect a hotel window picture tomorrow evening and maybe some baby pictures if my brother and sister-in-law will allow it. Maybe I’ll just put my hand over his face and post that; we’ll see. We’ll stay overnight– the boy is psyched about staying in a hotel for the first time in forever– and be back Sunday, and then Monday morning I start actually Preparing for Things. We’ll see how well I do.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Hell Yeah edition

On July 25, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

Quite a lot accomplished in the last 24 hours or so.
That is the bathroom floor covered in horrid blue glue and Tavy Thin Skin, which is a product I’d never heard of a week ago designed to make it easy to tile over vinyl. I spent a fair amount of time Googling and searching around and discovered that, while I found a lot of contractor types who hadn’t used it going “Man, I don’t see how that will work well,” I couldn’t find anyone who had used it and had bad results from their floor. The biggest complaints were about spreading the glue and that was something I felt like I could deal with. We did not get to the skimcoat yesterday, but we did do it this morning:

So. Nice clean layer of thinset laid down; tomorrow we tile. That is probably going to extend into Monday but I’m hoping we can get it done in a day; it’ll depend on how easy it is to cut around the toilet and the floor register and to deal with the two rows where we basically just have to re-cut the rectangle on the tile.

A day after the tile is set, grout.

A day after the grout, the sink and the toilet (at least the toilet; I’m predicting complications with the sink) goes back in, along with the door, and we are set, son. At least until we decide what to do with the electrical. The lamps are still going to be in the wrong place, and we won’t be putting the mirror up until we decide where to put lighting. But basically everything below the waist will be finished.

Also completed today and yesterday: Cut the trim around the door so that the tile could go under it, trimmed the door itself by half an inch, then yanked a door from our other bathroom and trimmed it by half an inch. That door in particular has been a huge problem since we got the house; at some point some water got between the vinyl and the subfloor in there and bubbled the tile up, and the door’s been extremely difficult to open and close, to the point where we rarely use it.

No longer. Fixed as hell. We’ve both been just opening and closing it for the hell of it.

Also fixed: every folding closet door in the house, damn near all of which were off their tracks. I’m kicking myself for this one; turns out these are extremely easy to fix, it’s just not immediately obvious how to do it.

Important detail: not a bit of this project (and by “project,” I’m extending all the way back to the very beginning) would have been possible without the internet. We would have made so many mistakes. I love being able to look shit up and find videos on how to do stuff any time I need it.

And now I shall go to my other job, and endeavor not to fall asleep behind my counter.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Friday

On July 24, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Basically took yesterday off from bathroom stuff because of the carpet/tile people coming in to clean; clearing the living room and dining room of anything we could carry counted as work enough, and I spent the day in here working on Searching for Malumba.

I will be satisfied with myself if, by the end of the day, I have:

Cut the door trim so that the tile fits underneath it (already done!)
Fixed the last couple of screws on the plywood piece so that they’re flush
Measured, cut and glued down the Tavy Thin Skin over the vinyl tile and plywood
Restored the living room and dining room to usable status

I will consider it a bonus if I have also:

Laid down a skim coat of mortar over the Thin Skin.

No tiling is planned for today. I’m hoping to get that done this weekend, and I should be able to, especially if I get that skimcoat done.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: mystery WTF addendum!

On July 21, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

That’s hardwood. From the BEDROOM. And it is a good 1/8″ higher than the subfloor around it, which is gonna play hell with leveling this mess.

Those of you with a carpentry/contracting background are welcome to speculate as to just why the hell the bedroom’s flooring extends an inch and a half into the bathroom. I’m hornswoggled.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Today’s agenda

On July 21, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Got a lot done yesterday, including averting/dealing with one major setback when the floor didn’t turn out to be quite what we thought it was. Ordered new underlayment for the tile today that ought to be here by Friday, so we didn’t lose much time over it.

Anyway, here’s what’s happening today:

Pull out the old sink and vanity
Get rid of the rest of the wallpaper
RedGard and mud the piece of cement board we put in yesterday
If time allows, dry-fit the floor tile

That’ll be a day, I think. Whee!

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The backonthehorsening

On July 20, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy13 Comments

If you’ve been reading this blog for way too long, you may remember the Terrible Decisions series, in which my wife and I decided to redo our bathroom. That process led to a (if I don’t mind saying so) good job re-tiling our shower, and then… stalled.

She has the week off. We are unstalling.

Hello, over-the-toilet shelf!

Goodbye, over-the-toilet shelf!

Hello, floor trim tile!

Goodbye, floor trim tile!

Hello, toilet!

Goodbye, toilet! Hello, wax ring!

Goodbye, wax ring! Now, the raggedy hole in the wall there is the reason this entire nightmare project got started in the first place: we had a leak behind the tile, and the water was running down the side of the tub and basically turned that corner of the drywall into mud. (I just spent ten minutes looking; I posted a picture of it at one point but hell if I can find it.)

That one simple thing– ripping that piece out– turned into a full-bathroom renovation. Which we WILL FINISH this week because if we don’t we only have one toilet and I will not live in a house with one toilet. At any rate: I cut out the diseased part of the wall, carefully avoiding cutting a hole in the stack and thus necessitating what would probably be thousands of dollars in repair costs.

Yes, I know this is cement board, not drywall, and you’re not supposed to use cement board in place of drywall. However! It’s also in the same spot as the bad part of the wall. If we end up with the same leaking problem in the future, I want it leaking into cement board, which is going to be RedGarded and thus a lot more waterproof. This part of the wall will be behind the toilet anyway and so the minor difference in texture shouldn’t be too noticeable.

Next step: Get rid of the rest of this goddamned wallpaper. Which I expect to take the rest of the damn afternoon. If not my entire life.

Terrible Decisions: Chapter You Go To Hell and You Die

On April 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

Let’s not discuss how long it took to simultaneously obtain the time and the will to finish the cement boarding. Let’s also not discuss the extra hole next to the hole for the shower pipe (which is also new as of today) because thirteen and a half inches and fifteen and a half inches are not the same thing. Hell with it; there’s a board behind it and I’ll fill the fucker with mortar. It’ll be fine. And if it won’t, don’t tell me.

Next step, mortaring and taping all the seams. Then RedGard, which… well, that’ll be fun, for certain values of “fun.”