Here’s a second visualization of the bathroom, looking from (approximately) somewhere in front of the closet. I have to tape out the cabinet depths to confirm, but this looks pretty good to me. And the quote is lower, too!
Saturday afternoon we made time to run to a showroom to look over some cabinetry for the new bathroom. After perusing all of the styles and colors, we settled on a nice white design that’s not too far away from the kitchen pattern, and will look good with the tile/wall combination. My big concern has always been cost, and after the consultant drew up some plans that we both liked, he clicked and clacked on his calculator and showed us a number that made me sigh with relief.
Then we did the same for the front wall, which will have a large cabinet for linens on the left and two lower cabinets under a counter for other items, with a cutout for a chair in between. We hemmed and hawed over the placement and drawer setup, because the windows are lower than standard counter height, but I think we settled on something everyone likes. I braced for a much larger price tag but after he clicked and clacked I sighed with relief again.
Don’t judge based on these shitty scans of shitty prints; I think it’ll look really good when they’re in there. The cabinet brand we’re going with is one our friend Brian recommended, and it’s quality stuff. It’ll even have fancy soft-close hardware, which I’m told is an HGTV requirement.
So I applied for a home equity loan and we’re waiting to hear back from the bank on that. With the balance of that loan we have the room to do a bunch more things (or one big project) and Jen and I talked over a couple of possibilities:
- New dining room windows to replace the outside pair and the inside pair, which are still roughed in.
- A new gutter on the roof of the new bathroom, which wasn’t replaced with the main roof and is a sagging, clogging wreck
- Caps on the other gutters so I don’t have to climb up and possibly fall off and break my neck
- Some kind of heat source in the kitchen
- Siding: we’re dealing with the original sheathing on this house, which is solid 3/4″ wood, covered in ancient crumbling tarpaper, then covered in cedar shake. Over that is the aluminum siding, which dates back to the Johnson administration, I’d wager. Having the house wrapped in Tyvek and covering it in a faux-shake siding would go a long way to lowering our energy bills, making the interior feel more cozy, and improving the curb appeal of the house.
Celebrating the fact that I got paid this week, I promptly ordered a prehung closet door from Home Depot for the new bathroom. It was a little tricky to find something that fit the style of the rest of the house but HD had what we needed in the size we wanted. And as luck would have it, the door was on sale this week so delivery will basically be free. The only downside is that it won’t be here until the end of the month. I’ve been stalled in the bathroom on trimwork waiting for this door and for movement on the cabinetry, which is wrapped up in a larger ongoing discussion about other project priorities and how we’ll wrap those into a home equity loan. I think I’ve identified what my maximum loan payment will be, which obviously caps the amount we borrow, so it’s now a matter of filling out paperwork and getting the loan started. Meanwhile, I haven’t been able to nail down my neighbor the electrician to finalize the wiring, so we haven’t fired up the heated floor yet.
Once the door is hung I can continue with the trim surround all the way to the shower and start putting kickplate in permanently. The next big trick is going to be adding 3/4″ shim around the inside of each doorjamb so that the casing will sit flush with the wall. (I left the sheathing intact on the walls, which may have been a mistake, so there’s sheetrock over top of that; thus the jamb is generally 1/2″ too narrow. But what’s done is done). Then I can mill and install casing around the back door. The front door will get done toward the end of the project, once the cabinetry is all in place.
The greenhouse is looking great, although one of my Roma plants has developed blossom-end rot. This is due to a lack of calcium in the soil, which means I’ve got to amend it quickly before I lose the whole plant. I’ve got some products coming from Amazon to combat this and hopefully we can catch it before all of the fruit is damaged. Two of the cherry plants have grown taller than the ceiling and are still producing flowers, so I know everything else needs fertilizer too.
Strangely, half of the marigolds Finn and I planted are happy and blooming, and the other half are 6-8″ tall and continuing to produce new leaves but no flowers. I’m going to give those another week to bloom, and after that I’m going to toss them. Apparently I let them get too leggy too early and didn’t pinch off new growth soon enough. Honestly I think the cheaper seed is doing better than the expensive stuff.
Finn was having a problem booting up one of her favorite apps after school yesterday, and I had to sit down and troubleshoot the issue. I locked down a ton of different settings when I set up her iPad so it took me a bit of time to go through the list and figure out what was blocking her (the app icon didn’t even show up on her desktop). When I logged in as her parent it was visible to me, and I spent a bit of time in the Restricted Apps section wondering why it didn’t show up. It wasn’t until I looked closely at the app itself and realized it was rated in the App Store for 12+ and I had her iPad blocking everything 9+ that I realized what the issue was. As soon as I switched this, it showed up fine. I was initially a little annoyed at Apple, but once I understood how the system worked, I appreciated the ability to switch these settings from my iPhone so much more.
We have shower door glass!
And we have grouted floor pebbles! I’m told we can shower in this thing today, but I’m going to wait a day for the inaugural test run.
Brian stopped by this morning to grout the glass tile on the walls and then lay down the pebbles on the floor in the shower. HOLY SHIT GUYS IT’S COMING TOGETHER. He was then able to haul all of his tile gear out, making the bathroom look 1,000 times bigger again—except for the section in back where I still haven’t finished up the moulding around the wall. Next up will be installation on the glass door and grouting the floor tile; after letting that set, installing a shower head and caulking the seams, we can actually use this shower!
…I’m going to go looking for new toilets.
I put this up on Instagram but I was so proud of what it looked like this morning I took another picture and now that’s here. This is is the result of about 4 good hours of woodworking, which was made up of 2 hours of squaring all of the weird framing and 2 hours of cutting and fitting. I still need a bottom plate for underneath the sill and finishing trim, and I have to recut the rounded trim at the top of the three wall plates (I cut it about 4 inches too short). Once I’ve got those pieces I can assemble the top moulding and put that in–it’s always easier to install that as a whole–and caulk the whole thing up. I also studded out the doorway to the closet to prep it for framing, which I can maybe start next weekend.
Meanwhile Brian is here today to (hopefully) finish the tile on the bottom of the wall, put the top of the bench in, and possibly get the floor tile installed. He should be able to come back and grout the whole thing later this week, and we’ll be that much closer to complete in there!
We went to see Captain Marvel this weekend, which was pretty good but not the best Marvel movie I’ve seen. Finn enjoyed it. There were several places where female empowerment were FRONT AND CENTER, which I love to be able to show her. I enjoyed those messages but I thought the movie overall was somewhat disjointed and rushed. There were several moments of character-building but most of that got pushed aside for PEW-PEW-PEW-BOOM action fights staged in the dark that I really couldn’t see. Grade: C+
That’s the shower tile as it stands today. Brian is coming back to finish the area down to the floor and around the bench, and then he’s going to grout the walls. Then he’ll lay the floor in and grout that. We have a rough quote on the glass door, which is not cheap, but it will highlight the interior of the shower perfectly as you walk in the door.
Jen and I spent another weekend almost completely consumed by grading student work. We did get out here and there but it wasn’t at all what I hoped we’d be doing, for the second week in a row. We’ve been trying to line up things for Finn to do while we’re busy but it’s hard to stay focused when there are kids running around—who inevitably come to us to help them find something to do.
I’m at the point where I’m doing twice as much work to teach than I did my first semester; as we’ve gotten more involved in refining the rubric and syllabus and have striven to offer constructive, helpful feedback (going so far as to add a third project into my syllabus to give students an earlier idea of how they’re doing) the workload has quadrupled. Jen and I are conscientious about how we grade our work, so we double-check each other’s grading and notes, which adds more time to the process. And Finn sits idly by, bored out of her mind. Saturday was a mixture of rain and sunshine, and even though it was cold and damp we should have been outside hiking somewhere, not stuck inside.
I turned to Jen Sunday night and told her I’m thinking about quitting teaching. Finn’s life is flashing past me, and I’m not spending enough time with her right now. It’s breaking my heart.
One thing we did do as a family is go to see a matinee of How to Train Your Dragon 3. The three of us have been hooked on the series since Finn was old enough to appreciate it, and it was one of the many things we shared with the Morrises (I can’t hear the phrase “DEPLOY THE YAK” and not think of Rob and Zachary). The final movie in the series was good. It hit all of the main plot points and character beats as a good movie should; there were callbacks to the original movie that old-school fans appreciated, it definitely hit us in the emotional core (my family is pretty heavily invested in these characters, after two movies and three TV series) and it wrapped things up in a solid way that felt right.
But it was lacking the careful pace of the first movie, which took time to slowly show us the wonder of the relationship between a boy and his dragon, and how that in turn affected his relationships, as an outsider, with his community and his father. The first movie (I rewatched a bit of it last night as I cleaned up my desk) moved slower, took time to develop the stakes, and also let us breathe. It showed us how wonderful the world it created was, asked us to notice the details, and gave us time to appreciate them. I felt like the new movie was following a producer’s note that simply read, “MORE DRAGONS”. There was so much going on in every frame that it felt hard to keep up with what was happening. The only time I really felt like it was slow enough to let me appreciate the story was at the very end, and if I hadn’t been so familiar with the characters from my previous experience I wouldn’t have cared half as much.
The IPWhatever is kegged and carbed, and I tapped it on Saturday afternoon. In terms of taste, it’s pretty nondescript. Even after I’d dry-hopped it for much longer than I’d intended, the flavor is still pretty bland. But it’s got a hell of a kick–I never did a final gravity reading on it (because, after I’d fucked it up, what’s the point?) but it definitely hits me when I finish a pint of it. And that’s good timing, too, because the grapefruit IPA is just about kicked.
Our neighbors on the right side, who have been in the house as long as we’ve lived here, recently moved to an assisted living community and put their house up on the market. We were in New York when they held the open house, so we didn’t get to walk through it, but we told a bunch of friends and our brother and sister to check it out. Having walked through the downstairs a few times I didn’t see any huge problems, but everybody we know said it was more work than they were willing to take on. As it turned out there was a bidding war on the first day and it’s going to settlement this Friday. Apparently the buyers have kids a little younger than Finley, and they’ve had several people come by to look at the place, who we can only guess are contractors. I hope they’re normal and we can get along with them.
Here’s where we are with the shower as of today. Brian was in yesterday and made huge progress on the north wall (left side) and begun the back wall up to where the niche starts. It’s really beginning to come together.
We’re getting somewhere between 4-6″ inches of snow right now, so I’m working from home. Jen made some eggnog pancakes and bacon and we all noshed on that for breakfast, and a little after lunchtime we went over to the Elementary School for some sledding. As of 2PM it had stopped snowing, and tomorrow’s forecast is for 50˚ so I doubt there will be anything left when I get home after work.
I finally kegged the IPWhatever I’ve had sitting in the fermenter for four months; I dry hopped it at least a month ago but never pulled it out into a secondary to filter so I have no idea what to expect in terms of flavor. It could taste like shit or it could be the best beer I’ve ever produced; I’ll never be able to recreate it in any case. It’s currently carbing in the cooler, and should be ready to pour by the weekend.
Here’s what the new wall tile looks like in the bathroom. Brian has the front window blocked off so you can’t really get the daylight on it yet, but it looks beautiful to me.