The Ink-Pot and the Palette

Monsoon came back today from his long (but very comfortable) exile at my mother's house, and after a bit of a pout in the basement, seemed very glad to be home.

My Serenity DVD arrived this afternoon, and I'm going to make a new Christmas Eve tradition of watching it. With a shot of Laphroaig. And maybe some cake.

( I hope all my LJ friends are enjoying as pleasant a holiday as I am. )

Okay, I'm cracking my bottle of Laphroaig and cueing up the DVD.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

I was on my way home from work today when I got a call from my niece--the 11-year-old who's a huge Joss Whedon fan.

"Auntie Em," she said, "Do you remember where you left Tread Riser and the Bathtub of Resuscitation?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Well, when you get home, could you look at it?"

"Sure. But why?"

"I came over today while Uncle Ed was working, and I made you a present."

( I smiled and smiled. )

That is an image I can definitely live with.

It's a bright, very cold, windy day in Portland today, and I've just learned that, no, that blue stuff in the porta-potty, whatever it is, isn't anti-freeze.

( I'd give just about anything for a hot bath, too. )

Ed says it'll be done by Christmas. Everybody think positive, okay?

At last. One of the exciting finishes I picked out it seems like years ago for this bathroom remodel is partly installed.

( Come and see the pretty pebbles! )

The end of this project is in sight. Yay!

This computer has a dialup connection--and not only a dialup connection, but one that has a maximum transfer rate of...let's see...26.4 bps. The keyboard is on a table, and the monitor is at a neck-craning 45-degree angle to it.

I'm still at my mom's house, see. And though it's very comfortable here--and the coffee is very good--the internet connectivity is gonna make me crazy.

Of course, I could go home. It's just across the river, ten miles away. But there's the outhouse problem. And besides, I'm still in my bathrobe, with a cup of said coffee, and I'm taking one of those "I hate my tormentors colleagues" days off work, and besides high-speed internet, the only thing waiting for me at home is a job of plastering the bathroom walls.

In short, the remodel is taking too long. But it's progressing. I have (cold) running water. Walls. Flooring is imminent, and as soon as that's in and cured...toilet! Whee!

Then I can lose the outhouse, and clean up the debris, and whistle innocently as the City inspector comes to approve the new gas line so I can have hot water at last.

And hope he doesn't notice that I have a whole new, completely un-permitted, bathroom behind the lovely new pocket door.

When Ed pulled up the subfloor of the bathroom, he discovered one of those "oops" things that I hear are inevitable in a remodel: there wasn't all that much holding up the floor.

So he took out the wimpy and too-few joists he found, and today my bathroom was the bottomless pit.

( It's scary. )

Ed's going to put new joists in across the new, reinforced sill he added. He's then going to straighten the wall and add some missing studs.

In short, he's tearing down my bathroom and building a whole new one.

He assures me that it's all going to be wonderful in the end. Right now, it looks like the pit of doom. The very, very expensive pit of doom.

I've taken down all my towel bars and emptied all the bathroom drawers, shelves, and cupboards. The throw rugs and spare toilet paper and stacks of towels and bottles of shampoo that absorbed sound are gone, and my little 14-foot-long, 4.5-foot-wide boxcar of a bathroom echoes.

Right about now, my contractor, AKA my brother-in-law Ed, should be ripping out drywall and tearing up the floor. Pretty soon, he'll be cutting a large hole in the back wall to make a new window.

The Bathtub of Resuscitation is sitting in my driveway in a huge cardboard box. My living room and dirt-hole basement are filled with the smaller boxes that keep arriving by UPS and FedEx: tile, an on-demand water heater, faucets, flooring, towel bars, door handles, a sink...

Monsoon has gone to live with my mom for November. I'm going to be moving into a hotel for the next few days.

I guess I should figure out where.

Since Tread Riser and the Bathtub of Resuscitation, there have been delays in my bathroom remodel. Most of them have had to do with my own uncertainty about spending that much money.

So I decided to consult a real bathroom designer, and she and her sidekick visited the project site, aka my house, yesterday.

( Good news )
( Less good news )

My 50th birthday is in December. It's my goal to celebrate it, at least in part, by getting up to my neck in hot water in my very own bathtub of resuscitation. Wish me luck.

I think I've just borrowed my life away. You know the ads that say, "If you haven't refinanced in the last five months, you NEED to look into an incredibly low-low-LOW interest mortgage loan from Carcharadon, Crocuta and Sapiens!"?

Well, I didn't go quite that far, but I've gone completely to the dark side anyway by applying to refinance my house. They call it all kinds of things, but it's a mortgage. Mort-gage. Anglo-French, from Old French, from mort dead (from Latin mortuus) + gage security.

That means I'm engaged to make payments on this thing till I die. And all for a new bathroom.

Eeeeek.

I woke up yesterday in a state of despair so thorough--and so apparently sourceless--that the only thing for it was distraction. "I shall paint the bathroom!" I thought. "Lavender!"

Fifteen hours and two or three hundred dollars' worth of paint and fittings later, I had a bathroom devoid of hardware and lighting, and no more than two square feet of wall actually painted.

( Turns out it wasn't a job for the fainthearted. )

I just wanted to paint. Pretty color! New towel bars, y'know? Instead, I'm exhausted and annoyed, and I've got no place to hang my damn towels for at least a week.

I'll say this much: it totally took my mind off the despair.