All at once

Its weird, but things hit all at once normally - the good and the bad. The fun and the annoying.

Just about the time we're finishing up this bathroom (hopefully) and cleaning up the construction mess that's all over our house right now we'll be bringing Mal in for another surgery. You know the lump on his belly where his incision from the thread removal surgery was in the fall? Its not folded skin - its either some fat coming through to just under the skin or the start of a hernia (the vet could actually feel the hole and push the stuff back in there - ewww!). Its a tiny opening but the vet thinks its a good idea to take care of it before something seriously bad potentially happens. Poor little guy. Thankfully it will be a day procedure (that won't set us back $4 grand this time) and he'll have a small incision with skin staples (no metal ones on a 7" cut this time). Unfortunately it means that our little man will be in an e-collar again, and locked in the den for 2 weeks while he recovers. He and Jayne just play far too rough for it to be safe for him post surgery. Dammit!

The plumber comes for the bulk of the work (hopefully) today. Nightly showers at my parent's place continue. I'm glad its an option, but its still pretty annoying. I guess putting up with this kind of crap is why we have the house we do though. I'm not sure how we'll work Wednesday-Thursday, because we'll be out late at the Shadow's Fall/Lacuna Coil show. If there would be any useful bathroom related work for me to do, I'd have the option of taking Thursday (or Thursday and Friday) off. The problem is, Brian took Monday and is taking Tuesday. Damn! We have a ton of vacation time and aren't going anywhere to use it, but the time we can both work on things together is limited. Perhaps I'll take Thursday just to strip the paint on the doors, sleep late and who knows what else? After tonight we'll have a much better idea of how things will go. For now, I'm just trying to go with the flow.

Bathroom

The plumbers are out. They can't do all of the rough plumbing today so they'll do half and the other half tomorrow.

Why can't they do all of the rough plumbing? Because the dumbass former owner decided that when he had to run a pipe he'd carve wood out of the floor joists to make room. Like the floor joist that was right under our toilet, the he carved enough out of it to leave about 1" thick of 100+ wood holding up the toilet. Why we didn't fall through the floor, I don't know. My boss said that it gives great new meaning to the term "dropping a load". Ouch!

So they'll do 1/2 of the rough plumbing today and Brian and my Dad will reinforce the floor joists. They'll do the rest tomorrow. Then we put down a new subfloor and they'll connect the tub when they can according to their schedule (here's hoping they can on Friday). Then we put walls, do all the tile, and THEN they finish things up, connecting the toilet and the sink. So we're looking at another week or so hopefully. Had things gone as we initially expected the tub would be in now and we'd be doing walls/tile. So their stupid has set us back about a week.

Incidentally, the "cut it if its in the way" route is something they did pretty often. Like, they cut out most of the studs in the walls to make room for plumbing. Our kitchen sink was hung on drywall with no wood behind it, because they had cut the bottom part of the studs out to make room for their suck-ass plumbing. Why that didn't fall off the wall, we don't know. I guess a pedestal isn't meant to hold up the sink, as much as to hide the plumbing (according to my dad, with some elbow grease you should be able to pull the pedestal out from underneath the basin and the basin should be securely held on the wall - heh, ours was apparently holding the sink up entirely). I'm so glad we decided to make this huge mess, because otherwise there would inevitably been serious issues down the line. Brian joked, asking if our house would burn to the ground from the bad electrical or just be flooded when the pipes went. My theory was that the flood would put out the fire (my Dad tended to agree).

Even still, I love being a homeowner and tweaking things. There are so many funky things hidden in your walls and your floors, and they are definitely useful skills to gain. :)