She wanted to redecorate the bathroom...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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So Mrs. L.A. has been wanting to spruce up the bathroom. She wouldn’t tell me what she wanted to do because she thought I’d fuss about it and I’d end up liking it anyway. She finally started. She tore out the vanity and sink, the mirror, the overhead cabinet and the cabinet by the sink, and took up the floor. She bought some nice floor tiles.

OK… Laying the tile is not a job we want to do. Neither of us has experience, and we don’t want to mess it up. The handyman we use wouldn’t be able to do it for a month. That was at least a month ago. We have to wash our hands in the kitchen or the utility sink. And I have to shave blind while I take my shower. (But that’s what I usually do, so no hardship.) In the intervening time, we decided we should remove the Mystery Chimney.

There’s another thread on the Mystery Chimney. As a reminder, this house is 81 years old and has had at least three additions to it. I don’t know how it looked originally. The bathroom is tiny. Really tiny. There’s a chimney in the corner that was framed and drywalled in. It had no opening to the house. It just got covered up during one of the renovations. Opening up that corner would provide maybe two square feet of extra space, and also make the bathroom seem larger.

Of course it’s not as simple as demolishing the chimney and repairing the roof. It turns out that one side of the chimney extends to the kitchen wall. It looks like they built the rest of the wall onto it. So when the chimney comes down, there will be a strip of open wall in the kitchen. And I’ve just had a horrifying thought: What if the side perpendicular to that does the same thing in the front bedroom? The bedroom that serves as storage space for a lot of my junk? :eek:

Anyway, the plan was for Mrs. L.A. to tear out what she tore out. Then have Daniel come in to do the floor. Then Mrs. L.A. would do the drywall and paint and put in the new fixtures. That changed. Now it’s: Mrs. L.A. does what she did. Daniel & Co. demolish the chimney, repair the roof, drywall at least the ceiling, and take out the weird box-like framed structure over where the sink was (it looks like a previous owner built it to hide the wiring they left outside the popcorn-covered ceiling). Then Wifey would do the drywall, and when that’s finished Daniel would come back to do the floor. Then last night she said maybe we should just leave the Mystery Chimney. :smack:

Anyway, the guys are up on the roof taking down the chimney grey brick by grey brick. I hope they finish (and finish the roof) today. The Missus says that since it was my idea to remove the chimney, I have to pay for it. (I count three guys at $25/hour each.) It will be nice to have everything done, however long that takes. Might be quicker if we have the handyman to the drywall. After going without a bathroom sink, and after the recent power outage, I’m tired of ‘camping out’ in the house.

And it all started because she wanted to redecorate the bathroom.

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Well, they made it to below ceiling level. I had to move the cat food and remind them to be careful not to knock debris onto the microwave and toaster ovens.

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Now I want a small fireplace in my bathroom, I would use the jacuzzi more often. Probably save a bunch of money in the long run on scented candles.

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I hope you find something cool hidden in the chimney. I’m pretty sure it happened to The Happy Hollisters!

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squint I didn’t know you two were married. Is this recent? For some reason I recall all your dinner threads being about your girlfriend.

Anyway: eff renovation. We just had some done/did quite a bit ourselves, and we’re pooped.

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Announcement. :wink:

I wouldn’t mind doing more of it myself, but I just don’t have the time.

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Also to an unfortunate first wife in Forsythe’s short story “Used in Evidence.”

I sincerely sympathize… I’ve run into more than one of these “Oh, what NOW?” remodeling jobs…

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…another good reason to keep matches in the bathroom!

Johnny, this summer, within 2 months, we’ve had to have a broken sewer line dug up with a back-hoe, destroying our lawn. The neighbors complained bitterly about how bad it looked until we could get it not only fixed but re-sodded.
Still, the judgemental sniping and griping that people will spout as they walk on by…

(…really, you dog walking, shit-bombardier? You had to stop and complain loudly outside our house each and every morning …? Its not like you couldn’t guess that our lawn guy was booked for two solid weeks. Either way, you couldn’t drag that rat-with-legs fucking ELSEWHERE for your bombs-away parties?
You HONESTLY SHOULD wear a Blue Fucking Baggy on your head for Halloween, sheisskopf.)

Then the landscaper for one of the neighbors? He scalped the whole side of the Brand New Turf trying to do a small section of the neighbor’s lawn. You see, he was trying to do that with a John Deere Ginormous Sit-Your-Ass-On-Down Tractor Mower.
(Yeah, buddy… those foot long, sand-filled, 1/2 in diameter galvanized steel pipes that I just sledged into the ground along my side of the property line? Let your [del]broken blades[/del] conscience be your guide.
But I’ll tell you what, if I hear your blades snap? I’ll give you your worthless “sorry” back. :dubious: )

And that was before the ceiling started warping and falling inside the upstairs bathroom. Which, to fix, because of the timeframe involved, means converting the downstairs bathroom into one with a shower stall first.

So, Johnny, I Truly Commiserate.

PS- Any decorator advice…? :smack:

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Update.

The chimney is demolished, the white bricks are cleaned and stacked in the back yard, the roof is repaired, and the bathroom is ‘cleaned out’. There’s a strip about a foot wide in the corner of the bathroom and kitchen that is open. Tomorrow the guys will come back and put green drywall on the ceiling and the corner where the chimney was. They might do more, since they have two sheets. We’ll see how it goes. Mrs. L.A. asked that they mud the ceiling, and she’ll do the rest. So after tomorrow, it’s her baby. Once she’s done with that, the guys can come back to lay the tile and the ball will be mack in the Missus’s court for the cabinets, sink, and shelves.

THEN we can think about fixing the kitchen-side of the open strip in the corner. We’ll probably re-rock the whole wall, which will mean moving the refrigerator as well as the counter I put in last year.

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Tell Lady L.A. to make sure they put screws in no less than 6 in apart, or she will be remudding that ceiling every two years until she does it.

Even if they texture it.

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Congrats on the nuptials! I didn’t see your (tiny) post.

When your wife is done there, can you send her over to my place. I need my bathroom redone.

StG

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This is a running joke in our house. When I pulled up the carpet in the middle bedroom, I found that a previous owner had nailed the carpet down. ‘So what,’ you say, ‘Carpet is nailed down.’ But I’m not talking about tack strips with the carpet stretched over them. I’m talking about nails every six inches, in rows about a foot apart (sometimes double rows), over the entire area of the room. (Now-)Mrs. L.A. said I should just pound them in, but I sat down on my bum and pulled each and ever one of the rusty bastards. We’ve noticed other things in the house that were over-secured. The bathroom walls (not the overhead – the walls) also had nails every six inches. If we hear someone in the neighbourhood using a rapid-fire nail gun (e.g., the guys building a house across the way) I’ll say, ‘Sounds like someone’s laying carpet.’

Anyway, the handyman is installing the ceiling. (Green drywall this time, instead of the regular white stuff someone else had used!) He should be here soon to finish putting it up and mudding it. Mrs. L.A. still plans on finishing (mudding) the walls when he’s done. She’s good, but she’s slow. So the plan is to have the handyman finish the overhead and do everything necessary for him to lay the tiles (next week, I hope). Mrs. L.A. can mud and sand the walls at her leisure.

As for the kitchen wall, the guys repaired that when they were fixing the bathroom. They ‘fixed it from the inside’, as it were. We’re still going to have to move the cabinets and counter we put in a while ago, to paint the patch. Da Missus will probably want to rip off the rest of the wall and put new drywall up at that point. But that can wait.

The bathroom certainly looks bigger with the mystery chimney out. Especially since there are still no vanity, sink, and cabinets.

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Huh. My wife and I re-roofed her (now sold) home years ago. Apparently the roof went on when roofers first discovered air guns. This was before air guns could shoot roofing nails. But boy oh boy, could they ever shoot staples. Inch crown, 1 1/2 deep.

Oh, and this was a modular home. Sort of. Basically a mobile home that they took the axles off and set on concrete piers. And since it was to be towed down the road… well don’t want any of those cedar shingles to blow off do we.

Pulled every damn staple out. Most of them broke in half. This job actually sent me to the hospital for a torn sheath on the muscle of my right forearm.

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The thing is, they didn’t use a nail gun. Someone used a hammer to pound in hundreds of nails to make sure that carpet wasn’t going anywhere!

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The previous carpet job in our house was glued to the subfloor. Boy were the guys who installed our new carpet unhappy.

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My last house was owned by a family (since new), then the older brother (who was pretty sensible) then the younger brother (the kind who walks through Home Depot with big googly eyes muttering, “Wow, I can do THAT for only $2.99 a square foot?”)

Also, Younger Brother was a member of the First Church of Jesus Wants Us All to Remodel Each Others’ Homes by Moonlight, so a lot of the material and jobs were done with… leftovers. Carpet seamed like a Mondrian painting. Two or three different kinds of padding in any one room. Paint on adjacent walls that wasn’t quite a match. A very cheap door that had been carefully extended and rehung in a resized frame that turned all the boards inside-out, had holes filled with spackle and new ones (badly) redrilled - what must have been a weekend’s work to save a $35 prehung door.

I lost track of how many stupid things I had to live with until I fixed them. I think the 1970s pimp-loft length shag carpet tack strips that poked through the rather thin, cheap carpeting everywhere were the worst. At least those provoked the most blue thunder late at night when someone stepped on them…

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That’s why she’s good.
If she’s not doing it for a living, she’s not going to have the experience to sweep eight feet of a smooth even coat in one perfect fluid motion.

But I still think the ceiling coat will last longer if the screws are closer, and the long edge is along the framing. I’ll check back in three years.

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Years ago I bought a row house in the city.
The previous owner glued the carpeting to the hardwood floors.

assholes - they abound without limit