Bathroom Dreames and Imaginacions

If I haven't posted lately, it's not because I don't have anything to post about, it's just that I've been too busy doing them.

Funny, it's so much easier to write about what I'm thinking of doing, and such a post this is.

My second floor bathroom needs work. That's undeniable. The bathtub is marred, discolored, and drains like an Amtrak train waiting for a freight to go by; the pedestal sink, while cute, is inconvenient and its plumbing was installed crookedly and leaks; the vinyl flooring is worn and curls at the edges; the linen cabinet is beat up, with doors that keep coming off the hinges; the tile is outdated and the wallpaper is absurd. A bathroom remodelling would be a glad and welcome event.

The other undeniable thing is that I am broke. Great credit still, but broke. I won't go into the gory details, but I do not have the funds lying around at the moment to redo my bathroom the way I'd like, or any way at all.

But it's spring and the remodelling contractor johnnies have emerged in force, attempting to drum up some work. So just for grins, I've made appointments with two of these businesses, to see what it's liable to run me to redo my bathroom, someday, maybe next year, when it might not be so laughable even to think about it.

Yesterday afternoon, then, a bloke came around from a firm I'll call First and Only Baths*.

This guy was enthusiastic, I'll give him that. I have an idea about making a cat litter box cubby under the stairs that are on the other side of the bathroom's lavatory wall, and he was so taken with it that I had difficulty in getting his attention on to what else I'd like to do. And he had no problem with my intention to do the tiling, painting, and other finish work myself, leaving the heavy lifting items to them.

But hmm, I have to wonder if this is a company I want to work with. When you've got drawings to show and the estimator still gets off on tangents about what you want to accomplish, what would you likely end up with? If you tell him you want something lined with Formica® or MDO plywood, why would he insist you should make do with stick-on shelf liner instead? If you've told him your tub drains too slowly, from what realm of fantasy would he import the idea to turn the head of the new one around so the drain line would need a greater fall from the plug hole to the soil stack? Why when you tell him repeatedly you'd need them to demolish and remove the tub, would he keep saying, "Oh, you can break it up if you want! We won't leave you with tub pieces at the top of your stairs!"

I can't imagine.

And then there was his insouciance about the floor structure as is holding the ceramic tile and clawfoot tub I want to put in. I have pictures from February when the kitchen ceiling was opened up to repair the bathroom sink plumbing. I showed them to him. It's obvious that the span between joists is too great to allow ceramic tile without sistering the joists or adding support to them somehow. But oh, no, he dismisses that; oh, it'll be fine just the way it is! They redo hundreds of bathrooms! They put ceramic tile on floors like that all the time!

I asked whether he thought the floor as it is would take the additional weight a cast iron clawfoot tub would add. "Why are you so worried about the structure?" he laughed.

"Because I don't want my bathtub in the kitchen."


He was very cheerful about simply taking up the existing vinyl flooring with its ¼" luan plywood underlayment, slamming down some HardieBacker® onto the 3/4" x 3¼" tongue-and-groove subfloor, then installing the ceramic mosaic on top of both. "Um," I ventured, "wouldn't you be putting down some exterior grade plywood first?"

"Oh, no, we wouldn't need anything like that! We've been doing these bathrooms for years!"

Yes, and I can imagine the cracked floors they've left behind. It'd be charming to think that First and Only Baths* can reverse the laws of statics to make it cheaper for me to redo my john, but me, I dunna think so.

But as Mr. Estimator burbled away, I got to thinking: How much, really, of this job can I not do? Demolition only looks formidable when you think of it overall. But if you've got a good crowbar, the tile comes out in pieces. Ditto the bad plaster (if it is bad, that is). Same with the old linen closet. The bathtub, being such a mess, probably isn't worth putting on CraigsList. Wearing suitable protection and armed with a hefty sledge hammer, I could knock the bejeebers out of it quite handily.

If I took things slowly and considered them well beforehand, I could cut and install the new cement backer board; maybe I could even sister the joists. Maybe, maybe, if I studied it out and got the right tools, I could also relocate the HVAC outlet and replace the plumbing lines for my lav and tub!

Well, no, maybe that's too fantastic.

I can imagine all that. What I can't imagine is hiring First and Only Baths* to redo my second floor bathroom.

As the kids a few years ago used to say, "In your dreams."

Good Intentions

Oh well phooey. I meant to make a post about digging two humongous holes and hauling tons and tons of old sandy dirt out and dumping tons and tons and tons of new compost and manure and peat moss and topsoil in, not to mention digging out the stump from the arbor vitae in the first place, and so getting two more roses planted yesterday (Wednesday) evening. . .

But it took longer than I thought to download the pictures (haven't done it for awhile due to the computer being on the fritz). And then there's something I don't quite like about one of the roses. I mean, they aren't supposed to have funny markings on the leaves, are they?

I have emailed the supplier. With photos.

So there won't be a post. At least, not much of one.

Quick Update

Haven't done any woodwork stripping since before Easter; the garden and the yard has demanded all my attention. I'm pleased to say that a lot of shrubs and perennials I thought were goners actually came through the winter alive.

No pictures, though. My computer picked up a trojan and it's still not quite right. I don't dare post any photo files until I can make sure they're not infected.

So that's where I am at the moment!

Vertigo

This evening I finished stripping the last of the balusters and fillet stops from the railing of the stairs going up to the second floor.

And I'm living dangerously withal. I went ahead and knocked them all loose to work on them down the basement.

Gradually, carefully I've done this . . . The first ten balusters from the top I had to remove: they backed up to a wall and it'd be hell on wheels to redo the bannister or repaint the wall with them there.

That left the eight at the bottom. Remove two, put some weight on the railing, see if it's holding up. Yes. Remove a couple more, push on the railing again. Not deflecting? All right.

Rinse, repeat.

So now the only thing holding up my hand rail is the newel posts at the top and bottom of the stairs.

See the magic levitating stair rail! Thrill to the gravity-defying spectacle of solid oak resting on just about nothing!!

Do not try this at home; at least, not at homes with young children.

Me, every time I look at that gap the floor of my stomach gives way like a trap door. Can't imagine why; the stairs to the basement have no railing at all. But on this staircase, above and below and from any and every angle, the vacancy between shoe and rail give me a persistent case of vertigo.

Which is not to be construed as saying that the demounted posts will be reinstalled any time soon.

More Blog Redecorating

I'm marching onward stripping stair rail parts, which is repetitious and boring and doesn't bear writing about.

The really fun thing I've been doing the past few days is tarting up the houseblog.

As you may have noticed, I got the wide ad running (no, this isn't a shameless inducement for you to click on it). But I've also gone to town on Blogger widgets.

Want to see what I've accomplished on various rooms in the house since 2003? Check out the slide shows! I'm up to early 2008 with adding photos to the related web albums, and when I feel like doing something brainless, I go into Picasa and upload a few more.

Then, get a load of the House Progress calendar. It's not for my To-Do list; goodness, no-- it's for my Got It Done list. If there's a red-orange dot/rectangle on a date, that means I actually accomplished some work on the Sow's Ear that day. Ain't that keen?

What I need some friendly reader to tell me is, can you click on the dates and read what I've recorded there? That would be good. Or does nothing come up at all? That would be not so good. Or . . . can you, O Reader, click and fool around with what I've written on my calendar? That would be very bad indeed. Please. Don't. Do. It!

And I've changed my blogs-I-follow list so I can see when their authors have made new posts (and, I have to say, you guys are slacking off of late. Come on! Give me an excuse to click over!).

These features should make my blog ever so much more attractive and informative and entertaining!

Unless, of course, all these bells and whistles are making the blog take forever to load, so nobody wants to read it any more . . .

Oh, dear. "What your best friends won't tell you." But give it to me straight: Are the new features helpful or not? If they just get in the way, I can always delete them, no problem. After all, redecorating the blog is a lot less work than renovating the house-- not to mention more easily reversible.

Blog Housekeeping

I've finally figured out why the 300x250 ad block on my blog never gets used, even though my Adify account says I've got buyers for it.

It's because the template default size of the right hand sidebar is only 240 pixels wide. I kind of tumbled to that when I put on a new house photo a little bit ago and noticed it was chopped off on the right side.

So I went into the HTML and widened the sidebar to 320 pixels. Now the picture and the ad block have room to breathe, and hopefully pretty soon I'll be rid of that placeholding blank and have an ad above the fold.

However, you'll notice that I wasn't able to move the radiused corners to the new location. In the HTML window it says, "The images which help create rounded corners depend on the following widths and measurements. If you want to change these measurements, the images will also need to change."

Well, I did change "the widths and measurements"; can anyone advise me on how to change the "images" as well? The template is called "Rounders," but I can't find anything on Blogger Help to solve the problem.

Suggestions gratefully received! Meanwhile, we'll see what Adify comes up with now that my ad space is the right size.

It's Here!

Last night I dreamed my William Morris wallpaper had arrived, and some friends came over to help me hang it. And before I could direct procedings, they did-- badly. The joints didn't butt up; they had gaps as big as 1/8" wide. Other places, the strips overlapped a half inch or more. Or strips were cut and put up in weird narrow widths, for no reason at all. I found myself taking great long pieces back down and having to trash them. I worried whether I'd purchased enough extra to come out with a decent job after all.

And throughout the dream, the paper that was being hung was the same pattern I just got rid of in my 1st and 2nd floor halls and stairway!

That dream was a relief to awaken from.

It was better than a relief, then, when around 8:30 this morning my dog's frantic barking heralded someone at the door. It was the FedEx man, come to deliver my William Morris wallpaper for real!

The WallpaperDirect people surely did a bang-up job of packing it. I had a dickens of a time even trying to find where the lids to the boxes were! The second carton, I used my knife and bypassed finding the flap altogether.

And the wallpaper?

Ooohh, it's pretty! No, there was no miracle-- the "Savernake" for the dining room didn't magically turn out to be more tan and less green. But the pale green it is, is very, very nice.

But, echoes of my dream, I was alarmed to see that the "Blackthorn" for the 1st and 2nd floor halls and stairway is a half-drop and not a straight match. I wasn't able to use the calculator on the website to figure out how much I needed, given the diagonal going up the stairs. Instead, I drew up AutoCAD elevations and figured out how many repeats were required, adding some on for good measure.

Oh, oh, oh, I hope I figured it right and ordered enough! By the time I'm ready to hang this paper, this particular dye lot will be long gone.

But begone, dull care! My William Morris wallpaper has arrived, and it's simply luverly!