2/14/07

* * * What I love about this whole house-renovating experience is how Fred and I, despite being beaten over the head with evidence to the contrary, are stupidly, naively trusting that workmen will show up when they say they will. Needless to say (though I will, of course SAY IT), the insulation guys never showed up yesterday morning. I got to the house at 7:45 and stood there looking out at the rain thinking “Jesus GOD IN HEAVEN all I want to do is go back to bed!” I called Fred and told him I didn’t know what I wanted to do while I was waiting for the insulation guys to show up, and he presented me with several thousand things that needed to be done, none of which I WANTED to do, and I hemmed and hawed and thought about just sitting on my ass reading while waiting for the guys to show up. In the end, I started prepping the upstairs bathroom to be painted. Said prepping included: removing screws and nails from the wall, removing the coves and quarter-round from the bottom trim, removing outlet and switch plates, taking down the shower rod, taking down the mini blinds, and last (but certainly not least) ripping the coves from around the ceiling. This last was the hardest part of the whole job, and I wasn’t terribly thrilled to find myself teetering on a ladder that was propped half in the tub and half on the floor, using a pry bar, screwdriver, and hammer to pull down this fucking trim that had six-foot nails every inch and a half the entire way around the GODDAMN ROOM. I took a picture of the trim I ripped down, along with the nails sticking out, but the picture didn’t do it justice, and I deleted it in a fit of pique. I was just trying to figure out how to take down the medicine cabinet (and kind of excited about doing so, because it’s the original medicine cabinet from the 50s, and it has one of those slits in the back where men would put their straight razors when they were used up because apparently throwing razors in a wall to rust and be found by people in 50 years who are klutzes and will slice the holy shit out of their arms and die in a bloody puddle on an ugly linoleum floor was considered A Good Idea and More Convenient Than Hauling Ones Ass to the Trash Can, and I wanted to see how many razors were there. DON’T JUDGE ME.) when I heard a door slam in the driveway, and looked out to see the tile guy walking toward the house. Did I mention that we’ve got a tile guy doing the tiling around the showers? The more Fred read up on tiling, the more worried he got that he might mess it up, so he had several people come out to the house to give estimates, and ended up going with the guy who was (1) cheapest (2) least likely to blow smoke up our asses (3) with good references and (4) a good attitude and a willingness to start work soonish. I won’t share a picture with you just yet, but I really like the job the tile guy is doing and the tile Fred picked out. Anyway, the tile guy showed up to work on the upstairs bathroom, and so I stopped doing anything in there so I wouldn’t be in his way. He endeared himself to me – once he heard I was clearing stuff out of the bathroom – by offering to disconnect the toilet for me. And not only did he disconnect the toilet, he brought it downstairs and put it on the porch for me. I should have asked him to be my valentine, no? While he worked, I ended up doing a lot of small things, like taking nails out of the trim I’d removed from the bathroom so it can all go on the burn pile and… well, fuck if I can even remember what the hell I spent the rest of the morning doing. I painted chair rail and quarter-round and crown moulding, I know that. I couldn’t turn off the power to replace plugs and switches because it was too dark out, and the tile guy needed light to see what he was doing. After the tile guy left I went upstairs, admired his tiling job, and tried to remove the medicine cabinet. I had no luck with that, because there’s a wire running through the medicine cabinet to the lights on either side, and so I left the medicine cabinet in place and finished removing screws from the wall. Then I did what I really didn’t want to do, and that is paint with a paint roller. New things scare me, so I’d been avoiding painting with the roller and only painted with a brush, since brush painting is how you (I) paint trim, and trim is mostly what I’d been spending all my time painting. The painting with a roller thing ended up not being too terribly difficult, and I got the lower half of the upstairs bathroom painted before Fred arrived in Smallville. In fact, I got a second coat of paint done before we left for the evening. And today? What are my plans for today, you might ask? Well, lovely readers, I get to haul my ass out to Smallville again to meet the GODDAMN insulation guys who will “definitely” show up today and didn’t show up yesterday because their “truck broke down”, according to the guy Fred spoke to who was “just about to call” Fred at 9:30 yesterday morning. Hopefully I’ll get there early enough to get an initial coat of paint put on the upper half of the upstairs bathroom before the insulation guys arrive (or should I say “arrive”, since I’m not sure they even truly exist as more than a figment of the imagination of the “salesman” who keeps assuring Fred they’ll be there “on time”), then I need to do touchup painting on the quarter-rounds Fred nailed down yesterday, and then I’ll put a second coat of paint on the upper half of the bathroom, do the trim around the bottom of the bathroom, paint some more quarter-round and crown molding, and if I’m feeling froggy I JUST MIGHT GODDAMN START PAINTING MY GODDAMN BEDROOM CLOSET. I can hardly breathe from the sheer goddamn excitement of it all.

* * * This is a small cove in the upstairs bathroom where we’ll either put some sort of storage furniture, or Fred will build shelves, or something. I was removing chair rail from the wall, when I saw the gap on the right side of the picture. I peered through it, wondering if there was anything back there, and the thought “What if I saw two eyes peering back at me?” came to my mind, and I got so creeped out that I had to go call Fred to talk me down from the ledge. I’m replacing all the floor heat/ air registers with new ones that look like these. I thought these, at more than $10 apiece, were expensive until I looked online and found that you could buy heat/ air registers for upwards of $100. ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR A DECORATIVE PIECE OF METAL YOU PUT IN THE FLOOR. No thanks! I sure do love Chickadees. * * * Naturally, I’ve been blaming Joe Bob for the near death of my chewed-upon plant, only to find out that Tommy’s the culprit. Or one of the culprits, anyway. * * * Previously 2006: “Stop following me,” Sugarbutt said. “Or I shall call the gendarmes and they shall kick your ass all the way back to Paree.” 2005: “I wasn’t worried,” Fred said to me. “Because any party where the invitation suggests bringing Dance Dance Revolution pads is not one that’s going to get out of hand.” 2004: No entry. 2003: No entry. 2002: Be our valentine, bitch! 2001: Could this get any more exciting, talking about the weather? 2000: Is it wrong that hearing about that incident gives me a whole new respect for Maria?]]>