My bathroom, it is a showplace.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I can’t believe its 6:30 PM and I’m still going to make page one!

Rue, a hint from our bathroom remodel on picking out that new mirror. Be sure you can actually pick it up before ordering it. When we did ours, we decided to have a BIG mirror. We ordered an 8’ X 4’ (yes, that’s feet) for our 8’ wall ( that’s the long wall, by the way.)
We ordered it from a shop that’s sold glass and mirrors in Seattle for 70 years. That would be Perkin’s Glass. When we went to get it, Mr Perkins, who is something of a curmudgeon, had taken a liking to my husband. No one EVER gets to drive into the warehouse, but he let hubby drive on in.
Inside, we parked and there it was, our BIG, shiny mirror. Mr Perkins waved us off and picked the BIG mirror, like an 8’ X 4’ piece of cardboard, and nestled it gently into our truck.
Did I mention that Mr Perkins opened the glass store 70 years ago? And did I mention that at 5’ 4" I’m taller than he is? But, I believe I failed to mention that hubby is 6’ 2" 100% firefighter, and card carrying member of the MAN club.
We got home, cleared a path to the bathroom, and hubby hoists the BIG mirror out of the truck. By the time he got up the five steps to the house, his big man muscles were trembling, his face was red and sweat was running into his bulging eyes. Could I help? “YES, G**DAMNIT!” He had to pay extra man dues that week.
We did get it installed without mishap. We learned a valuble lesson. BIG mirrors are also HEAVY.

When we were all done with the tiling, painting, spackling, and swearing, we realized that we hadn’t reinstalled the toilet paper dispenser. We now have one of those cutsy ones, about two feet tall sitting on the floor. :smack:

42

Damn.

43

This so sounds like it belongs on the back of a gay porno movie.

44

:eek: another novel? That means she already wrote one? I didn’t even know she could read.

I’m staying at a hotel tonight, but I have high-speed internet access! :slight_smile:

45

well, I managed to clean my bathroom and rip some wallpaper off the wall but that’s as far as I got on my renovation. Both my bathrooms have hideous, badly pasted wallpaper, we hates it! It does peel off really easily … except for the backing which won’t come off even with the special dissolver stuff and scrapers. We hates it! I’m thinking of doing some sort of textured looking paint so if I can’t get all the paper off it will just blend in to the texture. Yeah, it will probably look like crap.

I need to replace the floor tile in my bathrooms. It’s this annoying little tiles that are impossible to clean between. I’m sure they used it because it comes in those sheets that are pre-spaced and you just need to grout but it’s ugly and annoying.

The rule in my house is to definitely put the seat lid down so the kittens don’t fall in, which they will. My boyfriend still forgets even after several beatings … er, even after asking him repeatedly.

46

No bathroom remodeling this weekend, but I did have to turn the water off to the house. The pipe from the meter to the house burst somewhere in the front yard. This required the water to be turned off and for someone to dig up the pipe so that it could be repaired. Take a wild guess who got stuck with the job of digging up the front yard.

Want a hint?

NO, it was not Christopher Walken. I’m shocked you would even think such a thing.

I dug up the yard myself, of course. Well, I did have the help of a shovel. I didn’t just use my hands and get my hands all caked in mud. My hands did get a bit dirty anyway, but not nearly as dirty as they would have if I had dug the yard up without a shovel. (But much dirtier than if I’d had someone like else do it for me, even Christopher Walken.)

It only took about an hour to dig the yard up and find the leak. It took another hour to go to Home Depot to the parts to repair the leak. The final act of repairing the leak took less than 10 minutes. After all that work in the hot sun, I turned the water back on and took a shower to wash the mud and gunk off of me.

Did you notice I didn’t mention filling the hole back in? I thought you might have noticed that. The hold didn’t get filled in yet. Since the pipe in we had to repair has broken twice now in less than a year, we are planning in the near future to replace the whole thing. If we don’t, we’ll eventually have no actual pipe left and instead will just have bunches of patches where the pipe used to be. For now, we left the pipe uncovered to give us a good idea of where it runs. My father-in-law is talking to some of his friends about borrowing a ditch witch so that I don’t have to use the old shovel to dig up the entire lenght of the pipe.

Anyway, that was the excitement of my weekend.

-Belz

47

:eek:

48

As it turns out, we’re not getting a new mirror. But we’re not just taking th eold mirror and sticking it back up on the wall either.

Last night, to see if it would work, I took the hangers on the back of the mirror (they are weird little metal brackets that slide into other weird little metal brackets you screw to your wall- I know this will be jolly fun to actually line everything up and get them to slide into each other properly) and put them back on. Not in the same places, that would be silly. But I took them off from a vertical orientation and reapplied them horizontally. It’ll be )as they say in France) trés spiff when I get it done.

But I can’t just screw the wall brackets up and be done with it. Nope. First I have to paint the frame of the mirror. It’s a wood-colored wood frame now, but I’m a-gonna paint it white. (Like the old Stones song- “I see a wood frame and I want to paint it white…”)

Actually I should put the brackets in the wall, make sure it all works out and then take the mirror back off the wall and paint the frame. Yep. That’s my plan now.

We’ll see how it goes. (The center of the spacing of the two brackets is 1/8" off from the center of the mirror frame. Bets on if it’s dead on the first go (after much measuring and agonizing on my part) or 1/4" off?)

Sounds much like a wallpaper-removal project at our first house. There were multiple layers of wallpaper all stacked up on a wall we didn’t want wallpaper on anymore.

So we got one of those punch-tracks-of-little-holes-in-wallpaper tools and the spray on wallpaper glue eater stuff. This worked great! Throught the first three layers. Then we hit the Strata of Vinyl. Vinyl wallpaper. It was lovely. It was so lovely, obviously the loveliness showed through the next layer of wallpaper. Well, it probably would have it the geniuses who were stacking up the wallpaper layers didn’t paint over it first. The punch-tracks-of-little-holes-in-wallpaper tools and the spray on wallpaper glue eater stuff didn’t have a prayer against the vinyl wallpaper that had been painted over.

So we got a hand-held wallpaper steamer. (I think you can rent these, but we just bought ours. There was a lot of wallpaper in that house that was just too ugly to leave up.) This vanquished the painted on vinyl wallpaper and peace reigned in our house.

Guess what? I have a new computer chair. I got it yesterday at Target on sale and put it together myself and it’s swell. It’s better than the old wooden kitchen chair I used to use for computering.

What happened to the old computer chair? The boys happened to the computer chair. Mostly the boys. 15 years also happened to the old wooden kitchen chair I was using at the computer too. I remember picking out that chair. We went to the grocery store and they had these wooden kitchen chairs for 20 clams per each. And we needed kitchen chairs because we had a new kitchen table, but no chairs. So we got some chairs and we were happy. Little did we know those chairs would cost us more than a dollar a year!

But I have a new chair now. It has wheels. And it adjusts up and down. It’s real nice.

49

<snerk> Make sure you don’t get any crumbs in the bed.

50

Thanks, sean, that’s zactly what I was thinking when I read what lissla wrote. :smiley: Thought maybe she was branchin out into “wives.” :smiley: So, how did the, erm, recipe go, liss? :wink:

Last night I had some lovely lamb leg. I’d bought one of those little boneless roasts and seasoned it with garlic and pepper and broiled it. It was nummy. Some Fordhook lima beans went quite well. Much better than Fayva. No chianti, though.

I’m tired today. The silly, but necessary Nicoderm patch is giving me a real workout on the dream front. (The package said it might.) So far the dreams have been highly entertaining but I am literally dreaming ALL. NIGHT. LONG! I’m officially smokes free for one month today. Hurray me!

Tupug the Smokeless

51

Yesterday I stole somebody else’s chair at work. She quit two weeks ago. Her chair has adjustable armrests so I can take my shoes off and sit Indian-style (gee … that’s not politically correct anymore, is it?) without hurting my poor kneeses. And it adjusts up and down, but I can’t really use the down. It’s a dilemma. Someone absconded with my keyboard tray long before I was given this desk (though they courteously left the brackets so I get a sharp pokey metal stab to the thigh at least once a day). So, the keyboard must rest on the desk itself. If I put the chair at a comfortable sitting height, I’m typing at chest level. If I put the chair at a comfortable typing height, my feet swing at least three inches off the floor.

Sometimes it’s fun being short. Other times, it’s just annoying.

52

My bathroom, not really a showplace, although I’ve re-painted every available surface except the tub surround:
Walls? Check.
Vanity? Check.
Medicine cabinet? Check.
Towel rack and toilet paper holder? Check.
Mirror frame? Check.
Floor? Check.
Also, I replaced the ugly (to me) wallpaper border with a stamped floral design. And the floor painting involved stamps as well.

It’s much better than it was when I moved in. The floor is vinyl tile that originally had a tres chic - sorry for any missing accent(s?)- harvest gold and brown pattern. Same one I haven’t yet painted over in the kitchen. Paint is a lovely thing to do when you don’t really know how you want it to look in the end and haven’t quite saved up enough to remodel anyway… But I’ve been thinking about re-painting the bathroom lately (I painted it about 5 years ago).

Unfortunately, my furnace and A/C have decided to require replacement, so the genuine bathroom remodel will be waiting that much longer. I’m just glad it cooled off BEFORE the blower etc. decided to give up the ghost. And it timed its demise to coincide with the days Mom is with Brother and family. The nice installation people are supposed to be here tomorrow morning. And they better not be related to Rue’s plumber, cuz the work needs to be done tomorrow.

So I’ve got lots of cleaning up to do in the basement today… I guess I should get started. I’ll be back later, I’m sure, to say hi to everyone…

GT

53

Wile, if the paper isn’t coming off without ripping into the wallboard, get a sealer on it (wallboard sealer, Kilz, Zinnser…). Then, skim a coat of mud over it and sand it smooth after sufficient drying time. Then you can do whatever you want to it and it will look normal.

Just putting a textured paint over what you have now will look kind of smarmy, and might end up peeling up in places with the bathroom humidity working on it.

54

The backing is pretty solidly stuck. I’ve tried the thing that pokes holes in the paper and then the Diff gel and then scraping and it doesn’t work too well.

I don’t know what you mean by mud. I assume it’s not actual mud? I’m not exactly Bob Vila or even Tim the Tool Man (except for the injuries) so I don’t know all the lingo. Would that fill any gouges made by trying to get the backing off and taking a little wall instead?

55

Drywall mud. Joint compound. Yes, it’ll fill in the holes and gouges and smooth the transitions of the various heights of materials left (which will show when painted otherwise).

Also, even if the backing does seem completely stuck, painting back over it without sealing is just asking for trouble. Maybe yours would be the one in twenty that doesn’t get bubbles or peeling, but why take that chance? Whenever I do a wallpaper removal, I always include this step, just to be sure.

56

(Dang it, I wasn’t finished)

So the order of redoing a wallpapered/vinyled wall is

  1. Remove wallpaper/vinyl (various methods)

  2. Apply sealer, let dry

  3. Apply a skim (thin, really thin) coat of drywall mud (joint compound), let dry

  4. Sand smooth

  5. Then do whatever you want to wall. If you’re papering again, you will need to seal after the sanding. If texturing or painting you don’t have to, but remember that one coat of paint won’t cover raw, fresh mud, whether textured or smooth. Some painters always use a specialised primer, I find that priming with whatever will be used as the finish is often just fine. Depends on variables.

YMMV on some things

57

“Tailor style”. You can still say “Tailor style”. Or, like they did in Soupo’s Kindergarten class, “criss-cross applesauce”.

You might want to go with that second one.

58

Criss-cross applesauce? Something tells me that’s not going to catch on in my household. :slight_smile: Of course, I’m the only person who lives in my household, so I’ll give it my best shot.

59

My, aren’t we handy this week! All this renovation. Since I rent, I don’t bother to soil my lily white hands fixing things; that’s what the landlord is for. I do know my routers from my drill presses, though; I made wooden toys for a summer in high school.

Friday night I went to watch my old friends (well, they’re not really all that old, I’ve just known them for years) play at the Somerville Library. They have music there on Friday nights, and my friends have played there every year for…7? 8 years? A long time, anyway. At this point, this is about the only gig the old band still plays. Then we went out for Japanese. I had sushi, of course, and dripped soy sauce on my white blouse, of course. I tried the red bean ice cream for dessert because I’d never had it before; it was good. I’ll definitely try it again.

Saturday I did my laundry because my housemates were coming home late that night and I knew they’d want to use the washer and dryer. I also cleaned the kitchen, mostly out of boredom.

Sunday we debated going to the last day of Musikfest but it was soooo hot we decided not to. I wasn’t really in the mood. I might have gone earlier in the week, but didn’t want to go by myself. So I vaccumed my bedroom and the hall, cleaned my bathroom, did some ironing and watched Tokyo Godfathers.

Draelin, is that the RenFair in Sterling, NY? Up near Suffern?

60

That’s the one. My only chances to go this year will be Labor Day weekend and the final weekend, September 23-24. But it’s very likely I’ll be there all day, every one of those days–just on general principle. :slight_smile: If you happen to be getting up there at any of those times, shoot me an e-mail.