In the absence of an actual post, since I have no thinkythoughts in my brain at all right now, enjoy this picture of my new shower, and contemplate how weird the reflections and shadows are.
Tag: terrible decisions
Rebathroomed!
As you can see from the strip of unmudded, unpainted drywall and the conspicuous lack of a shower door, we’re not quite done– the shower door is running late and should be here later this week, and they’ll take care of that part of the wall and a couple of other very minor tasks at that time. But I’d say we’re 90% done, and we threw a shower curtain on a tension rod on there so that we can shower in 24 hours after everything finishes curing, and the new floor is completely done.
So, progress? I’ll take it. Now we just have to figure out how to tie everything together, because the existing towels and bathroom mats and art on the walls do not work nicely with the blue in the new shower surround. But hopefully this fucker won’t leak.
Terrible Decisions: The Rebathroomening, Day 2
So, today involved:
- New subfloor in the bathroom and putting in most of the drywall;
- Pulling up the vinyl in the laundry room to discover the enormous extent of the water damage in there (and I’m pretty sure those are asbestos tiles);
- Pulling the washer, dryer, and slop sink and getting rid of the rest of the vinyl, then cutting out the damaged subfloor;
- Installing the new, one-piece shower pan. I dare you to soak through that, water!
Two more days, supposedly, and given how fast they’ve been working (and that the new flooring showed up today) I’m pretty convinced* that it’s actually going to happen. They’re not working on Sunday, but we ought to be done on Monday.
(*) crossing fingers
TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Not this crap again
Remember four and a half years ago, when we redid the master bathroom? Quite possibly not, as I doubt there are a ton of you who have been around that long. Well, it doesn’t matter, because we’re doing it again! Turns out that the new/old shower leaked. A lot! Which was the whole reason we redid it in the first place– because the first shower leaked, and we replaced it, and now the second shower has leaked, possibly worse than the first one did, and now we’re replacing that, and I’m down a bathroom again for, hopefully, just a few days. They’re telling us they’re going to be done by Monday, assuming everything shows up– we’re still waiting on the door and the flooring but that should be in tomorrow or Saturday, and it’ll be the last stuff to get done anyway, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
The flooring this time will extend into the laundry room, off there to the left, and we’re keeping the same vanity and cabinet and mirror and toilet and bidet we had before, and we are hoping not to have to repaint. We have gone with a built-in shower because I hate tile eternally and forever; I love the fact that the only tile in this house that has held up is the tile that I installed, in the hallway bathroom, and by “I love the fact” I need you to understand that I hate tile and I hate grout and I will hate them until twelve years after I die. At any rate, we’ll see how the new look for the shower works with the new floor tile (it’s not tile, it’s vinyl rectangles, but whatever) and then we’ll see if we need to do anything else with color to pull the room together. I’m worried that the room is going to look a little mismatched with the dark woods but no more dark tile.
At any rate, expect me to be screaming into the abyss for the next few days.
(Oh, also, summer school is finished as of today, so I’m on For Real For Real Summer Break now for the next month or so.)
One more project update
I will probably post pictures once everything is completely cleaned up, and especially once we have the basement functional again, but tomorrow is absolutely going to be a book review unless I decide to write two posts. I only got two projects done today, really, other than organizing and cleaning, but man, they were doozies. Both of these have been waiting for literal years to get done, and they took between ten to twenty minutes each. One of them required me to spend some more money, though.
Anyway, look at this thing:
That is a TRX X-mount, used for TRX suspension training. My wife used some wellness funds she had access to to purchase it years ago, and it has been sitting in the basement ever since, because it needs to be carefully anchored into a stud to work properly, and the enormous bolts it came with put me off at first, and then … in the way of such things, it just never got done, and then we had a basement goblin for two years, and, well, now the fucker’s on the wall and it was done in less than ten minutes. I am not actually strong enough to do pull-ups but I put as much of my weight on it as I could and my hands gave out before the mount budged. I have spent a lot of time today uttering the Dad Mantra, “That ain’t goin’ nowhere,” and this was the first thing that Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.
Speaking of:
Those mirrors were originally in our bathrooms, so at least one of them has been sitting in the basement since the original Terrible Decisions remodel a thousand million years ago. They are mounted to the wall now. They, also, are Not Goin’ Anywhere, although I might put a cleat on the one on the right just to ensure maximum safetiness. Actually, thinking about it, I could put trim around them. That would protect the edges— you’ll note that the top corner of the taller one is already slightly broken, and I’d like these to be as safe as possible.
They are also heavy as fuck, and I had to go to Lowe’s and buy two of these to move them, at which point a nearly-impossible task became something I could do by myself. Worth it.
Our new nightstands also arrived today, and I probably ought to put at least one of them together before bed. For now, though, it’s absolutely video game time.
Wave goodbye
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.
Still going
We are still doing shit around here.
Got up at six. By 9:00 I was downstairs wrecking these shelves. They were in the way. I forgot to take a Before picture but I imagine you can imagine.
Then the electrician showed up. The electrician installed all new LED lighting in the basement and tore out a bunch of ballasts that were starting to fail and, in one case, melt. It is astonishing how much friendlier the basement looks now:
(Our basement goblin isn’t completely moved out, so some of that stuff is hers.)
I should find an older picture of the basement with the old lights. My God.
We took my wife’s old desk apart and threw it out:
I built (and by “built,” I mean “put together according to the instructions”) my wife her new desk:
Cable management is coming, I promise. It’s making me twitch too. That desk is adjustable, a sitting/standing desk, which is absolutely ideal for my wife because she’s only 5’ tall. See that little panel on the right there, that you use to adjust it?
Those are the icons for “adjust to standing height” and “adjust to seating height.”
The current state of the dumpster. They’re coming to collect it tomorrow, I’m not exactly sure when:
Oh, we also threw away another old shitty end table and my old desk from when I was a kid, which we were using in the garage. I’m fully expecting the guy to complain that the desk is an inch too high for the bin and to have to cut it in half at the last minute.
Not pictured: I threw away all of my CDs— several hundred of them– which have been sitting on a shelf in the basement for fifteen years. I strongly suspect a lot of them won’t even work any longer and there isn’t a single device in the house that even plays CDs any longer other than some similarly-ancient electronics in the basement that are getting taken to e-waste tomorrow or Friday. I only discovered one CD that I didn’t have an MP3 copy of— a recording by the jazz musician ex-husband of a friend who is no longer alive— and I decided that I didn’t need to go to the trouble to find a way to rip it.
Other tasks today: I beat the bedroom 90% into submission; most things are where they are going to live now, and my leather chair and ottoman have been moved into the library, which is now a little more crowded than I like, but all three of us can sit in there at the same time now. I also reinstalled the rack for the wall shelving that we had to remove when we tore the wall down. And, somehow, more vacuuming. Apparently at some point we ran an extremely busy pet grooming business for like a year, never cleaned up any of the fur, and never noticed until this week. Also I went to the comic shop. It’s Wednesday, after all.
In other news, I am about 120 pages from the end of the 1,232 page book I’m reading, and I’m going to either finish it tonight or die. Not sure which.
Tomorrow: one last frenzy of throwing things away until they take away the dumpster, put together the new cabinet for the garage, a little bit of touch-up painting in the bedroom, install the last bits of baseboard in the bedroom, clean clean clean, organize the garage as much as we can stand, a little more work in the basement, and go visit a showroom for the next bathroom project.
Yeah. There’s another fucking bathroom project. I’ll tell you later.
Still doing stuff
Let’s start with something I didn’t do. Or, at least, I didn’t do much. I hired a man to come dig up the pole. I did not dig up the pole. I’m a job creator now!
Here is the hole:
I gave this wonderful human $120 for about an hour of work and it is the best $120 I have ever spent, because he not only dug that fucking thing out of the ground but he also beat the shit out of the concrete with a sledgehammer until it broke off the pole. Here is the pole:
You see that shit? They sunk a giant steel pole into thirty inches of concrete, triple reinforced with rebar, to hang up a wood birdhouse. The pole is also completely full of concrete after about a foot past what I had cut off. Like hell am I doing that job. That is absolutely what money is for.
Speaking of overdoing things, we used to have a workbench in the basement:
and also:
See that piece on the left? That’s a four by twelve. That’s a fucking ceiling beam, is what that is. And some crazy bastard decided to repurpose it into a workbench and absolutely overengineer everything. We were going to take the cabinets out too but my wife decided against it, so at the moment, they remain. There was also a quarter-inch thick steel plate, maybe 18” x 72”, as part of the workbench, but I didn’t get a picture of that. It’s in the bin, though!
It’s in there, I promise. You can see part of it in between the closet doors on the lower right there.
Anyway, that’s Day 2 of What I Did On My Spring Break. There are a couple more minor tasks to be done tonight but they don’t involve destruction. The garage cabinet arrived today; we might get around to throwing my wife’s old desk into the bin tonight or we might do it tomorrow. We’ll see.
We have one more full day with the bin and they come to take it away on Thursday. There is a slight chance that we might have them bring us another one. Stay tuned.