Tag: emotions

The Gutting of the Bathroom – Day I’ve Forgotten

We are now into a month without the master bath.  Things are progressing slowly to say the least.  Mitch has tiled the floor and it looks really good.  He does good work.  We decided that the best course of action on the ceiling was just add a layer of quarter inch underlayment over the existing sheetrock and re-texture the ceiling.  Great idea and it fixed the ceiling faux paux, but now the ceiling height is a quarter inch lower than normal height.  A quarter inch doesn’t sound like much, except when you have had custom cabinets made to fit the room and now the room is shorter.  As Maxwell Smart said in Get Smart, “Missed it by that much!”  So Mitch has to shave off a quarter inch from the cabinet in order to make it fit.

Another new development, when Mitch measured for the cabinet over the toilet, he measured the outside of the area, not the back of the wall.  Guess what, the back wall is an inch shorter than the front of the wall.  I know, most normal people would assume that the wall should be straight, but not in this house.  Nothing is straight or level, or normal height.  In order to help solve that problem, the sheetrock has to go.  After the sheetrock was pulled off and replaced with quarter inch underlayment, we’re still five eights of an inch short.  So more shaving.

One step forward, two back.  It’s starting to wear on us.  At least we’re still married.

The Gutting of the Bathroom Day 15

Day 15 I had to go to the doctor’s office today for a tetanus shot.  I woke up this morning to a red itchy rash on both arms and put two and two together.  I know it doesn’t sound like the two are linked, but on day one I cut my arm on the house.  I didn’t think much of it at the time, cleaned up the blood and put a band aid on the cut.  For days I carried sheet rock, old boards and other various dirty things to the car dump.  The same thing happened to Mitch last year, that’s the only reason I even thought about it.  About two weeks after he had worked on the exhaust system underneath the El Camino, rolling around in dirt and rust where he scratched up his arms pretty good, he broke out in a red itchy rash and his joints started aching.  He went to the doctor’s office and yes he needed a tetanus shot.  My last one was fourteen years ago, so I was due.

This day turned into one step forward, ten back.  I had ordered lights for the mirrors online and went they arrived, the lights were way too big and had cloth shades.  Nowhere on the web site did it describe the shades as cloth.  Cloth won’t work in a humid environment.  I returned them to the home improvement store and found out I didn’t all of the necessary paperwork.  That meant a trip home to print out some shipping confirmation that had a barcode on it so that the same store that I ordered from could read and then authorize a return.  Isn’t technology great?

Meanwhile, Mitch is diligently trying to measure, cut and lay the underlayment so that he can tile the floor, but things didn’t go so well.  A couple of catastrophes interrupted that.  A flat tire and a tire store that can’t even look at the tire for 2 hours in order to determine if it can be repaired or if a new tire is needed. 

I’m trying to get all of the errands done, take back lights, buy new lights, stain for the cabinets, dirt and tomato plants for the garden, (and get them in the ground) because it’s time to plant.  Oh and don’t forget doctor’s appointment.  All of this and be done and cleaned up in time for a retirement, birthday and welcome home party this afternoon.  Our friends like to multi-task too.

At least we’re still married.

The Gutting of the Bathroom Day 9

Day eight was demolition day.  We cut a hole in the living room wall adjoining the bathroom.  This was done in order to get the icky tub and vanity out of the room and to get the new tub in the bathroom.  Mitch finally broke down and let me use some of his power tools.  He let me use the sawsall and it was fun.  We cut up the old ugly bathtub and carried it out in pieces to the El Camino to wait for the city clean up day and go away forever.  Mitch removed the cracked cast iron sink from the vanity and it went to wait with the bathtub.  I personally hauled out the “lovely” faux wood grain counter top out to the truck.  We dragged the vanity out of the bathroom to the living room, but someone with a lot more “lead in his pencil” will have to help Mitch get it out of the house.  It is really heavy.  Mitch didn’t want to cut it up, not sure why.  I would have. 

We were able to remove the huge honkin mirror from the wall and carry it outside without breaking it.  We carefully laid it on top of the old station wagon mirror side up so that the birds will see themselves flying over head.  Mitch removed the sheetrock from the walls that will hold the new tub.  It’s surprising how big the room is empty. Eight foot by ten foot, as big as some tiny bedrooms.

Day nine Mitch’s vacation is over and had to go back to his real job.  I think he’s really glad to get back and get some rest.  This means that this is going to take longer than we (I) thought.  So for now, we have to shower in the basement bathroom.  Woo hoo.  Sadly, my vacation is over too.  I have to go back to work tomorrow.  But we’re still married.

Charlie and Orso Playing While We Work on the Bathroom

The Gutting of the Bathroom Day Six

Day Six scraping the ceiling didn’t go so good.  Imagine that.  Because of the confined space, the bathroom had extra thick popcorn texture sprayed on it.  Scraping the ceiling is one of those projects where the doing doesn’t sound so back until you actually start the doing.  Then you remember that it really sucks, but once you start scraping, there’s no stopping, you have to finish the whole room. 

After I had finished, Mitch looked at the ceiling and pointed out a spot that he thought still had a little too much texture.  I wasn’t so sure, but thought that I would see if I could get a little more off.  I got a little more off alright, the sheetrock was too wet and I scraped off the texture all the way to brown paper.  And it wasn’t a little spot that came off, no I scraped off a big honkin strip of sheetrock.  Thinking there was nothing else to do, I started stripping off all of the sheetrock top, really soaking the textured paint.   What a mess.

Now not only have I scraped off too much, but I have a big horrible mess on the ceiling and on the floor.  Mitch tried to come in and help, but he quickly lost patience and fled to the garage to pull nails out of the salvaged boards.  Therapy I think.

The ceiling has to dry, then we’ll smear sheetrock mud over the whole ceiling, after that we can texture the ceiling again.  Just what we wanted to do, right.  I’ll let you know tomorrow if we’re still married.

The Gutting of the Bathroom Day 5

Day Four hit a snag. Big surprise. Mitch started to remove a one foot section of sheet rock from the end of the remaining closet and found the water supply vent pipe. The original plan was to remove the door from its present location which makes it a very shallow closet, cut off one foot from the end of the closet and move the door to the end, making the closet deeper and giving the room a more open feeling. Well not now. Moving the vent pipe would entail a very extensive, expensive and time consuming operation.

Mitch was really reluctant to tell me for fear of me going ballistic. Just one more reason to hate this house. No matter what I want to do, we have to alter and adjust our plans. I’ve thrown so many fits over the past five years, when we first started on this renovation path. But this time I surprised him and just shrugged my shoulders and said, “Oh well, we’ll just leave the door where it is and forget about moving the pipe.

He didn’t realize it probably helped that I had gone shopping earlier and bought the faucets, mirrors and fixtures that I liked without any interference, then came home and had two glasses of wine. I was feeling very relaxed.

Day Five today I’m going to scrape the nasty popcorn ceiling off, which is lots of fun. I have to stand on a ladder, wear a mask and goggles and stretch in the most contorted positions to scrape sections of the ceiling. Get down, move the ladder, climb the ladder, stretch, scrape, get down, move the ladder and on and on. You get the picture. Lots of fun, want to come and help?

The Gutting of the Bathroom or Will Our Marriage Survive the Remodel?

Today it officially begins.  My first day of vacation and the start of the Gutting of the Bathroom.  We have the most hideous master bath in the world, (my opinion).  So we (me) decided that we would take a week’s vacation and totally remodel the bathroom.  I mean how long can it take?  We’re taking out the ugly tub and even uglier vanity with the wood grain laminate countertop.  Who puts a wood grain laminate countertop in a bathroom anyway?  The sink had started to chip and crack.  There are two 70’s refugee globe lights hanging from swag chain over the vanity and one huge honkin mirror on the wall, complete with chips and backing scratched off.  I’m not sure how mirror backing can come off when it stays on the wall, but oh well.  When the lights were hung, evidently the person didn’t have a hole saw and cut a square hole so that the square edges of the holes peek out around the circular caps of the lights.  Very attractive and stylish too.  There is also a can light hung on the wall next to the toilet, to help you see for the ever important reading that men do in a bathroom.  The lovely can light was also installed using the square hole for a round cover.  But there is no light by the bath tub, guess you don’t really want to see that well in the shower.  The linoleum on the floor has cracked.  There are three closets just inside the doorway as you walk in giving you a cramped feeling that the walls really are closing in on you.

But all that goes away starting today.  We are going to move the tub/shower to where the vanity was.  Two of the three closets are going away forever.  In place of a vanity, there will be two pedestal sinks and a cabinet between them that is actually two pieces, the base cabinet will have a granite countertop on it and the upper cabinet will be hung on the wall and have sides that meet the base.  There will be two much smaller mirrors and there will be NO swag lights in there anywhere.

So far, we’ve argued over every piece for the bathroom.  Mitch has traditional tastes and I am more modern, contemporary.  It has almost gone to blows in the home improvement stores.  I had almost come to the conclusion that this marriage will never work, because our tastes are so vastly different. 

First is was the tub.  Mitch declared that we could only have a one piece tub and shower combo.  “Because no matter how careful you are or how good of a job you do caulking, the damn thing always leaks.”  Try finding a really nice looking one piece tub/shower combo, there aren’t that many out there to choose from.  Then is was the sinks.  I found a really nice looking square pedestal sink that he hated, saying it looked like it was institutional.  The really big argument came with the cabinets.  Nothing readymade really grabbed either of us.  I was willing to buy unfinished and make it work, but Mitch hated them all.  He found a custom cabinet shop and went to talk to them without me to get some design ideas and costs.  I just knew that custom cabinets would cost a fortune, granted they would be worth it, but I am working on a budget and figured the cabinets would bust the budget.  Surprisingly, the price was very reasonable, so now Mitch and I could focus the next argument on the design of the cabinet.  I said he is traditional, well if you have a fireplace mantel with a candlestick on one side, there needs to be a candlestick on the other side.  That’s Mitch.  Make me crazy.  This is when I started to doubt our marriage.

We finally found the tub by accident, we had gone to buy tile for the floor and there high up on the rack on display, was a one piece tub/shower combo that I actually liked.  I had Mitch drag one of those ladders only for use by store personnel over for me to climb up on and check it out.  We bought it on the spot and called one of our friends to come and load it in their truck and take it home.  We found two very nice oval pedestal sinks at a plumbing supply store and ordered them.  After long heated debates, Mitch took me to the custom cabinet shop so that I could look at and touch actual cabinets instead of sketches on paper.  We made a decision and now it’s on order.  Things are starting to gel.  I still have to go get towel bars, mirrors, faucets and lights (without Mitch), but I think we might make it.  I’ll keep you posted and let you know how our progress goes.

Is Journaling the Way to Go?

I’ve been told that journaling your thoughts are very important.  Sometimes I’m not so sure.  I have feelings and emotions that I would love to express but can’t tell anyone nor can I write them down.  If I write it down and someone was to read it, could hurt their feelings.  I was raised to be very cognizant of others feelings and to not intentionally hurt someone.  I know how I would feel if it were me.

I’m not talking about anarchy or murderous thoughts.  You know when the everyday events in your life just get to you.  Those little feelings and resentments just start to build and build.  I feel that I’m getting slammed from all sides, work, home, life in general.  Just feelings of being helpless to change my life and not having the courage to stand up for myself.  If I write it down, then I might see how trivial and small the issues really are.  Maybe that’s the point of journaling.