You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2007.
I feel like I’ve been kicked in the teeth with a steel-toed boot. Physically and emotionally. Mentally, I’m semi-stoned. But hey, at least I now have a better understanding of why people seek out this… this… state of being. Kinda being. Why they make themselves this way, or pretend to make themselves this way.
I had what is hopefully the last of the jaw reconstruction surgeries. They put me on pain drugs I’ve never had before. My relatives are coming to visit.
Life is quite the ride.
The rotten bathroom floor has been ripped right down to the thank-god-it’s-still-okay planking, scrubbed repeatedly with hospital-strength antiseptic, and rebuilt with cement board. It was a huge, nauseating job, but luckily we caught it in time. Once I get the new tiles laid (that’s easy to do, right?), the ABS drains rebuilt and the toilet back on, the sink cabinet fixed and reinstalled, new paint and trim up (shit, this isn’t sounding like I’ve accomplished anything!!!)….
… well, once all THAT’S done, it’ll look p’urty and clean again.
For about an hour.
I live with three males, after all.
With this unexpected little detour into bathroom hell, and the garden doors and deck, I’ve spent the last seven days straight screwing (sadly, not that kind), hammering, hefting, slugging, cutting, cleaning, and generally being a very grubby tom boy. Generally, I’m in my glory when I can muck about doing stuff like this. I’m so thankful that I’ve been able to do the work and get these projects further along. And working with “boys toys” is always a fun bonus (sliding compound mitre saws kick power tool ass!)
But after another full day of being covered in grit and grime, I looked at the several hours worth of tile cutting ahead of me tonight and said, screw it, I’m quitting for the weekend.
I may be productive, but I’m not graceful. I’ve got a fat lip, blood blisters, and more cuts, bruises, and splinters than I can count. If I don’t do something soft and girly soon, I’m liable to start belching the alphabet and sprouting chest hairs.
And nobody wants me to have to blog about that.
At one point over the weekend, there was a huge gaping hole in the front of our house, rain pouring onto plugged-in power tools, a pool of my blood on the floor, a bathroom pulled apart to surprise us with rotten wood and mold, a computer that had stalled in the middle of a complete system reformat, and cookies burning in the oven.
Who, me? Stress? Pfft.
Swear? Damn tootin’.
Scream? Only in my head.
Cry? Not yet, but one’s a brewing.
Drink? Youbetcherass. As much as I could afford.
But stress?
Nah….
Who has that kind of energy?!?
As always, life carries on, regardless, and all is now well again. Er, well-ish. At least all the offending things (blood, smoke, screaming…) have stopped, so that’s cool.
The gaping hole (and developing deck), in the surprise rain:
After a mere six hours of fiddling with shims, and screwing and un-screwing, and swearing that the carpenters level was possessed, we now have garden doors off our dining room! And they, like, even open, and close, and appear to be level, too! Go figure! How kew-el!
Pay no attention to the fact that there is still a 3 inch gap around parts of the doors, since that will have to wait a few more weeks until the matching living room window arrives and we can rebuild and refinish the front of the house. The window and siding aren’t things we had any intention of doing right now, but as any property owner can attest, nothing good is ever discovered when you take apart somebody else’s construction job!
And I should know this rule by now, you’d think. But, like a dummy, I ignored it. So whilst, er, sitting in the bathroom last week, I nudged a couple of pesky floor tiles that have been getting more and more loose since we bought this place, and then I foolishly lifted the edges of them, just to see if I could.
Not thinking, of course.
Yeah. The next thing I know….
I have zero experience with the construction or refinishing of floors, but I’m reasonably sure that the wood underneath isn’t supposed to be black, wet, smell like mushrooms, and look or crumble like this….
So I added ripping up ceramic tile and subfloor to things that I’ve never done before, but I’m faking my way through (because not ALL of it was loose, of course. Some of it was entirely happy and determined to stay right where it was.) Hell, we’ve never built a deck or installed a door before either, and that didn’t stop us from being idiots, so… in for a penny, in for a pound. Or rather, several thousand pounds/dollars.
Hey, did you know that when you smash up ceramic floor tile, it’s pretty much like shards of glass? I didn’t. That’d be the blood thing -I apparently stepped on something I shouldn’t have, and gashed open a toe. Since I have little/no feeling in my feet, I was clueless (a natural state of being, some would argue) about the red puddle I was causing until my daughter’s cry of “Eeww! Gross!”
It’s now several days later and we have a bathroom sink sitting in our living room, a toilet in our shower, and who-knows-what kind of nasty mold spores wandering freely throughout the house now that their cosy little bathroom floor loveshack has been demolished.
But, hey, at least my computer is, obviously, functioning once again! Thank god. Hopefully better than it has been for the last, shit, six months or more. I was FINALLY able to get it to reformat from the system recovery disk that it came with. Every other time I tried, it would just loop endlessly and not do anything. I had to take it in for service in January for the same issues and they reformated it for me, but they didn’t tell me what the problem was or what to do if it happened again – which, of course, it did. I still don’t know why the display drivers got/get all screwed up, but at least I may have figured out what was stopping me from being able to reformat the damned thing….
A space in the hard drive label.
A freakin’ SPACE.
Quite literally, nothing.
Sigh.
I lost some data in the process, including some, er, potentially sensitive stuff, but overall the reformat seems to have solved the problems I was having that were making it impossible to do anything without the blasted beast seizing up or blacking out. So at least THAT is one project/problem that I managed to get fixed and finished finally, knock on wood.
Just… not on the wood in our bathroom!!
(p.s. this may sound whiny, but please be assured that I am keeping my sense of humour, and am VERY conscious of how damned lucky we are to have property of our own at all… money pit or not.)
