Platitudes are bogus

You know that old saying, "When one door closes, another one opens"? And how it's supposed to signify something meaningful about opportunity or some such?

Yeah, well, in home renovations, when one door closes (FINALLY!), the only door that opens is the door to the fridge because it's time to get a cold beer and stop bloody working for the day.

But I'm kinda getting ahead of myself. It seems that I've been rather lax about updates this past week as we've been making a great deal of progress (well, for US at least) and I haven't posted anything about it at all. Better late than never, I suppose, so let's start at the beginning - or, in this case, Monday - when the electricians showed up to finish the wiring.

We weren't really sure how long it was going to take the electricians to finish all the wiring and put in the lights and whatnot, but we were really hoping they could get it done within a day so the War Department wouldn't have to work from home for too long.

Well, we really needn't have worried. Including a trip out to the Home Despot for a couple of switches they needed, it took them a little less than four hours. Yeah. Nice to work with professionals, I gotta say.

Anyway, here's what the new lights look like in full operation:



And in the bathroom:



Man, I can't even tell you how amazing it is to walk into a room and have lights come on just by flipping a switch. Seriously.

Anyway, once the electricians were done (and it became obvious that they wouldn't require an inspection - bastards) we turned our attention to something I, for one, have been dreading since the day we bought it. If you go back through this blog and look at some of the pictures, you'd probably notice that in a lot of them (like, say this one, or this one, or this one) there's this enormous cardboard box sitting in the middle of the floor where we're equally likely to either trip over it or attempt to use it as a workbench. We've been stepping around or over that bloody box for MONTHS and it was finally time to open 'er up and take out the glass walls for the shower. I had been dreading this for so long, I can't even tell you. The instructions made it seem like a relationship-ending nightmare in a box.

So, imagine our surprise when we got it out, set up, and installed in one measly evening. I don't even have any work-in-progress shots for you, it went in so fast:



Yeah. Took us an evening or so to clean off all the glass, and Amy did all the caulking (fiddly little stuff, drives me NUTS). All that's left is to fine-tune the door and put up the water stopper thingies.

Anyway, yesterday was manual labour day once more, as we turned our attention to the enormous pile of crap in the back yard that's been sitting there all winter, hardening slowly back into the impenetrable mass of clay it was before we dug it up from the ground:



Yes, even the Supervisor Kitty was astonished at how rock-solid it was.

Anyway, four hours with a pick, shovels, two buckets, and three trips to the Victoria Materials Depot (and $40 in drop-off fees) later, and... well, we barely made a dent:



Let me tell you, loading dirt into buckets and then dumping it into the back of a pickup is every bit as much fun as it sounds. No, really, and if you want to try it out, we've got plenty left...

So, finally, we come to the subject of our little platitude: the bathroom door. I'm not going to go into excruciating detail about the swearing, yelling, cursing, and screaming to which this particular task gave rise, and I'm not going to harp on about how long it took us to do (though, to give you an idea, we could have made at least four trips to the dump with more dirt - if it was open on Sundays, of course, which it's not, but THAT'S a rant for another day), but I will attempt to give you at least a hint of the frustration involved...

After trimming down both the door and the jamb in which it came, we maneuvered it into position in the doorway (gouging the ceiling a little in the process) and balanced it precariously in the opening. I was holding it up from the bathroom side, Amy was on the office side, and the door was threatening to fall either in or out, depending on which of us was a little too eager in making sure it stayed flush with the drywall.

It was at this point that Amy said, "So, ... now what do we do?" and we both realized that neither one of us had the foggiest idea how to actually hang the damn thing.


But we got it, eventually:



And let me tell you, when that door closed, I made a beeline for the fridge. It's like they say, when life gives you lemons...uh, it really sucks? But hey - if you have a lime, you can cut it into wedges and drop one in your beer.

And that's good.




I think there's a moral here somewhere, but screw it - I'm going to bed.