The wall is up. All of the black-and-white floor tiles are down. I dearly wish I could come up with four more, but the pattern has been discontinued. For now it's bare. If I get time I'll patch in the parquet tiles I bought as a sort of accent. It should look okay ( Read more... )

I have lots more pictures but this is the one I snapped with my camera phone to email to my dad. He talked me through the problem of the wall that's on the left side of the photo, which is basically rough framing around some freestanding pipes (the visible ones are part of the heating system). The frame stopped six inches short of the ceiling, and ( Read more... )

The mud ended up having to dry overnight, so I got up at 6:00 to start laying the floor since the only time the plumber could come was 8:00 today. Well, or next week, but since I really wanted to have a working toilet by Sunday I took what I could get ( Read more... )

My ceilings are 8'6" high.

Drywall is 8 feet high.

Time for some creative patchwork.

I have a plumber who's willing to come by in the morning to install the toilet so I don't have to worry about screwing it up and potentially flooding the house. All I have to do is get that section of flooring installed. I leveled off the low spot (rather imperfectly but it's a vast improvement). The original plan was to slap a coat of paint on the ( Read more... )

Hrm. It becomes more and more complicated. Yet progress has been made. The toilet is in pieces in the basement; a rag has duly been stuffed into the waste stack. Most of the wax has been scraped away; the rest can wait until I'm ready to put in the new toilet ( Read more... )

It's a damn good thing I knew to expect to find a wax ring under the toilet bowl, or that gummy brown mass would really have made me worry.

Well. I suppose it's a miracle this toilet didn't explode on us years ago. I just went in to remove the pipe that connects the tank to the bowl. One good twist with the wrench and the entire pipe buckled and disintegrated at the elbow.

At least I don't have to spend hours wrestling with the connections.

I finished my transcript (at 2:00 a.m.) so today is wide open.

So is the bathroom wall, because obviously the way to replace a toilet is to tear down a wall. If Mike Holmes were here he probably would have had the house razed by now ( Read more... )

Last night I dreamed I was hugely pregnant with a baby that seemed to be actively trying to claw its way out of me. It was incredibly vivid. Perhaps this is why I hesitated to use the word "contraction" in its grammatical sense when Sadie was singing "How'm I gonna get home" at the dinner table. "Know why I said how'm, mommy ( Read more... )