A two-day reprieve

Well, the Top Brass were SUPPOSED to arrive today - or, at least, that's what they TOLD us. Turns out they don't arrive until Tuesday, so we could have been working on the basement this afternoon instead of sitting around in the living room waiting for a rental car to pull into the driveway. Silly parents. At least I know where the War Department gets it from...

Anyway, it hasn't all been lying about on our bums. We've been quite busy, and so has the plumber.

Oh, before we get into it: the pictures in this post may not be up to the usual scratch; my camera is in the shop getting cleaned, and won't be done until tomorrow. So all of the pictures in this post were taken with the old piece of shit we all knew and hated.

So, we had a little extra job waiting for Leonard when he came on Thursday. The sink in the bathroom upstairs hadn't been draining properly for months, and because we had a rubber P-trap on it, we couldn't really snake it ourselves. Also, I had really no interest in doing it with that damn pedestal in the way. So we figured we might as well get the professional to do it, seeing as he was in the house anyway.

Even so, I really have no idea why we ever thought it would be a straightforward job. Nothing else in this house has been, is, or ever will be, and this was no different. He got the pedestal out of the way okay, but then noticed that the pipe in the wall was really corroded and cautioned us (well, Amy - I was at work, getting the story via a stream of increasingly hilarious emails) that it might be difficult. Then, while he was snaking the drain, his auger got stuck in the pipe and promptly broke off. ("Oh, dear," Leonard said. "That'll cost you.") So he had to break open the wall and replace the entire pipe:



I thought we were done with this drywall nonsense, I really did. Anyway, you can see how much fun making THAT patch is going to be.

Oh, and before I forget, take a wild guess what was blocking that pipe... that's right, about sixteen pounds of hair. Guess whose hair?



I haven't had hair that long since my head-banger phase in 1991...

Anyway, that little job took him most of the morning, but by the time he was done, he'd hooked up the shower and installed the toilet and vanity in the downstairs bathroom:





Man, I'd forgotten how much that camera sucks. I wanted to take a picture of the whole bathroom so you could see what a nice job Leonard (and us!) has done, but that camera couldn't take a decent picture of the inside of a lens cap. Piece of shit.

That said, it's time for another edition of everyone's favorite blog feature, infrequent though it may be,

The Injury Report

So, we've been painting the sills and trim around the windows in the office, and the combination of the plywood and the paint we bought just hasn't worked very well. I finally decided to just use the same paint we used on the walls in the laundry room for the last coat or two. Before I could start with it, though, I had to sand down some of the more egregious brush marks and whatnot. So I was sanding furiously along the top of the big window when I rammed my hand into the lip of metal on the edge of the window. It took a nice big gouge out of the back of my thumb, but it was actually the impact that hurt more than the cut.

Still looks pretty impressive, I think:



Anyway, may or may not get to the trim around the office side of the bathroom door tonight.

My money's on probably not, but don't tell Amy that.

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I should work less and post more...

At least, that's the impression I get from all the whining about the lack of updates. You'd think I didn't have a job OR a passive-aggressive, mildly incontinent cat, the way some people carry on. And that's just the War Department!

Anyway, despite the lack of updates, we have been busy. (Even if it seems to me I've posted that same sentiment on this blog at least once or twice before.) While we're waiting on Leonard to come back and install the remaining fixtures, we've been installing trim, caulking trim, painting trim, and doing unspeakable things to leftover bits of trim.

Oh, and digging, of course. Let's start with that, shall we?

When last we saw the enormous pile of crap in the back yard, we'd just taken three full loads off the top of it, and barely made a dent. Well, after another four trips to the Victoria Materials Depot on a hot and sunny Saturday (of which we've had precious few enough this summer, let me assure you), we've made more than a dent in the pile, we've made a dent in the back yard!



By the way, that's a nice little gig they got going on at the VMD. We pay them to drop it off (about $10 a load) and someone else comes in and pays them to take it away again! If we could have cut out the middle man, we might have been able to afford to pay someone else to do some of the work for us...

Anyway, once that was cleared away, it was back into the basement again, where Amy spent a great deal of time and energy installing the trim in the bathroom. I did most of the cutting, but the caulking, hole-filling, and paint preparation was all her:



I wasn't going to let her have ALL the fun, though, as I spent a good couple of days cursing and swearing at the window wells, which had to be closed in with plywood. Of course, this being our house with my framing job, none of them were square (of course) and no two sides were quite the same size:









Every single piece of plywood in those pictures was custom cut and shaped for its location. That was a lot of cutting, nibbling, testing, sanding, cursing, and - eventually - spackling. And no, those last two aren't some elaborate optical illusion. They really look like that. Of course, the trim is square -- it's the windows themselves that are totally out of level. (Since I took those pictures, I've covered over the edges with corner bead and sill trim, but I'm too lazy to go downstairs and take another picture right now. Next time.)

Anyway, we've got about a week until Leonard comes back, and we have to get the vanity installed, the trim done and painted, and a few other bits and pieces finished up in the bathroom before he gets here. And we have to prep, prime, and paint the window wells, build a casement for the workshop door, install the office door, get the office carpeted...

Uh, yeah. So... lots to do. I don't have a joke for that. It's just a lot of work.

Sigh.

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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.
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We have flooring. Yes, flooring.

Oh, you know the end is officially in sight when you can stand up (almost straight) and say (with a grimace), "Wow. That looks like a real floor."

And then go take a fistful of ibuprofen and lie down for a while.

Yes, we have a bathroom floor. Much like the floor in the upstairs bathroom, I can take full credit for this one as I did pretty much the whole thing myself. The War Department had a few too many beers on Friday night, if you must know, and wasn't up to helping much. Well, to be honest, that's only a half-truth; yes, she had too many beers on Friday night, but we had already decided that this particular job was probably best left to a me, given that only one person would be able to work in the bathroom at a time, and I was reasonably confident in my ability to do the floor myself.

The first part of the task on Saturday morning was to set up a little workstation for myself in the office so I wouldn't have to keep trudging back into the workshop every time I needed to trim down one of the planks:



Of course, the planks were far too wide to be cut on the chop saw (I used it exactly twice), so I wound up using the table saw almost exclusively -- except for those times I had to go trudging back to the workshop so I could clamp a piece down to the workbench and have a go at it with the jigsaw.

Then, as per the instructions, I opened all of the bundles of flooring so I could pick and choose pieces at random and not wind up with a weird pattern in the floor:



Which... I kinda did anyway, so ... well, whatever...

Anyway, the next step was a false start. See, the instructions (yes, I read them and no, they weren't singularly uninformative. I found them to be of tremendous use. Mostly to cushion the bottom of the floor tool so I wouldn't mark the cork when I was hammering away on it trying to get the boards to close up that last 32nd of an inch, but I digress) say to make sure that none of the pieces of flooring are cut to less than 4 inches wide. Given the weird shape of the bathroom, this was actually much more frustrating to work out than you'd think. Remember that I'm not very good at math, and then take a peek at the worksheet I used to figure out how wide the first strip of flooring needed to be:



(The reason there are two worksheets is because I worked out all of my calculations on the first worksheet (the one on the left) based on the floor planks being 7 and three-eighths of an inch wide. The right-hand worksheet is the one I made up after I remembered that the planks are actually 7 and FIVE-eighths of an inch wide. Measure twice, cut once, grasshopper -- but it's probably okay if you spend twenty minutes working up a plan based on the faulty first measurement. Sure. No one's in a hurry here or anything.)

Working from the correct calculations, I cut the first piece of floor to exactly four inches, got the first row hammered together somehow, and then started work on the second:



AND... that's about where I stopped for a break because I realized that I really should have borrowed Clamb's floor tool because I had to go off to the damn store and buy one.

But with the new tool proving to be something of a valuable asset, I managed to get into the groove a little bit and was pleased when my measuring turned out to be pretty dead on, at least at the first odd corner:



Then the second corner went in all right, even though it had a tricky angle on it, and I realized I hadn't even sworn at anything since I put in the third row or so. Woot! Now I was cooking with gas!



(And where, you may ask, was Amy during all this work on the floor? Well, she did come to the store with me to pick up the little flooring tool on Saturday, but then she went right back to what she was doing before we went out:



Ah, must be rough, eh?)

Anyway, it took me pretty much the whole day, but I got it done. Here's a shot of where I called it a day:



Yeah, that last piece wasn't actually hammered home yet, but it was proving rather finicky, I was starving, my back hurt, I had to clean up and make dinner, and I just couldn't deal with the nasty little bugger. As it turned out, I pulled up three rows this morning anyway so I could fix the second of the two corners at the shower because I'd munged up the cork pretty badly trying to get the pieces to lock together, but it all went back in with no problems, and it's officially finished.

(Oh, and my measuring job with the worksheets and whatnot? I was off by less than a quarter-inch. Not too shabby, especially for me!)

If you're wondering where the hole for the toilet went, I used the router to cut it out this afternoon. Which, of course, required another trip to Canadian Tire because, for some reason, among ALL the bits Amy had for her router, she didn't have a flush-trimming bit. Go figure.

Of course, you can't see the end result because we had to cover it up with cardboard in preparation for the return of the electricians, who are coming in tomorrow to finish wiring the outlets and putting in these babies:



Yes, they install cardboard boxes. Why not?
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Painting's done!

No, really. We finished painting and I have the pictures to prove it.

Actually, we finished painting last Monday, but I haven't got around to making a post because, well, we've been busy with other things. Like, oh, for instance, buying this:



Pretty sweet little sled, I gotta say.

Anyway, you don't come here to look at pictures of cars (and if you do, your Google skills need some serious work), so let's get to the basement portion of our program, shall we?


So, first up, the folks at Cloverdale paint worked their magic and color-matched the upstairs wall quite nicely (which is good because I really didn't want to have to paint the whole damn living room):



We painted the office a lovely color called "Dorset Cream" by Farrow & Ball:



And no, we didn't pay for Farrow & Ball paint. We're not made of money. But it's such a beautiful color, and the paint at Cloverdale is really nice stuff, so we're pretty happy with the end result.



For the bathroom, we picked a color called "Silver Sage" by Restoration Hardware. It's not easy to see in the photos, but it's a really nice shade of grey, with green, blue, and brown tones:



And, of course, we painted the laundry room, too, but that's just white and boring. Kinda like all the pictures I took of the office and bathroom after we primed them. A complete waste of time. No, really. Have you ever tried taking a picture of an entirely white room? It's almost as frustrating as painting on a second coat of white paint.

So, next up, flooring! The cork planks for the bathroom are currently sitting in the office, "acclimating" to the room... Oooooh, sexy!

Oh, and the electricians should be coming by at some point this week (I hope) to finish up the last bits of their part. Which means we should have actual LIGHT with which to work! Joy!
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Okay, so NOW we're back.

All right, all right. You can all just pipe the hell down now - here's your stinking update.

Despite the lack of bloggage lately, we have been making progress. Well, okay, WE haven't been making much progress, but our drywall guy's a freakin' machine. If only the damn mud didn't have to dry between coats...

So, the last post of any substance involved clearing out the scrap drywall and doing a little prep work for Tony the Drywall Guy. Well, needless to say, between the time we originally contacted him (before we went to Australia) and the time we called him back to start the job, he'd forgotten who we were and where we lived. Fortunately, he was still willing to do the work.

And wow, what great work this guy does! Here's a little "time lapse" slide show of the past four weeks:

Round One:





Including all his prep time, that took him about five hours. We would have considered ourselves lucky to do that much in five WEEKS.

Round Two:





All that took him about three-and-a-half hours. Yeah. He showed up at 4:30 and he was gone by 7:00. No shit.

Round Three:





That was about another three-and-a-half hours. And that was it. He was finished the job. Oh, of course, he also mudded up the big piece we put in the upstairs hallway:



And, thanks to him, we didn't have to worry about overlapping the drywall and the shower edge, or using a ridiculous amount of caulking.

Before:


After the first coat:


I'd tell you what we paid him, but you wouldn't believe me. Hell, I still hardly believe it. Seriously, he was that cheap. Hell, I would gladly have paid him FOUR TIMES what the final bill was, just to avoid having to do all that ourselves. And there's no way we could have done anywhere near as nice a job. Anyone need a mudder? Cause we know the best one in town, no fooling.

Of course, now that he's officially done, we no longer have any excuse to avoid getting back to work. And after drywall, the next step is...

Well, see for yourself:



We spent the long weekend working our way through that five-gallon bucket of drywall sealer/primer. Yeah. Five gallons of it.

Two coats.

On everything.




Good times, good times.
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Pictures!

No, not of the basement. All I did this weekend was put in about 20 or so Tapcons, and I'll be damned if I'm taking a picture of that.

I'm talking Australia pics! Woo!


Get 'em while they're hot.

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