DIY realization

Painting an entire house takes much more time than you'd think.

"Sure, we can do the painting," I said.

"No problem," I said.

"I've painted lots of times before,"I said.

All true......but never every single room in a house all at the same time. Oh, and painting also means doing the trim, the doors, the closets, and the disgustingly dirty garage.

And then there's the outside of the house too. I forgot about that.

Goodbye every single weekend for the next couple of months!

Plumbing Drama, Day 2 and 3

Yesterday, the plumbers arrived at 7 am and didn't leave until 10:30 pm.  It was an exhausting day and I wasn't even the one doing the manual labor.

Apparently, the plumbing company hired the three stooges to work for them, minus one stooge. That is not to say that they were incompetent, but that I swore that at any moment a fist fight was going to break out.  Lots of yelling.  Lots of name-calling.  Lots of mumbling under their breath at one another.  All that was missing was Curly's "woo..woo..woo" and "nyuck...nyuck...nyuck" and Moe's signature slap to the head of whomever was closest to him.

The senior plumber kept taunting the younger one calling him a little girl, stupid, idiot...etc.  It was breathtaking how much of a jerk he was being.  What made it funnier/worse is that the younger one would let the curse words fly when he became frustrated.  The senior, emotionally abusive, plumber would then tell the younger one to watch his language.  I guess in his economy yelling, "F@ck" at a pipe is worse than insulting another's manhood and constantly berating him throughout the day.

Most of these tantrums took place when the plumbers thought I wasn't around or couldn't hear them, but sound carries through the ventilation shafts when you're in the attic yelling at the top of your lungs.  By the end of the day I was happy to see them go.  They were always very nice when speaking to me, but the tension between the two of them had me frazzled.

My reward for listening to their bickering for 2 days was a hot shower after they left.  

We now have water!  Not only do we have water, but it is actually contained in pipes and not running out all over the floor or inside walls.  It's a joyous occasion

The plumbing inspector is supposed to swing by today to check everything out and make sure it's up to code. After that, we have to repair several holes in the drywall. 

We have vaulted ceilings and when the house was built, at the normal ceiling height, two 2 x 4 boards were laid horizontally from which the vaulted part of the house was built upwards.  This meant that the plumbers couldn't slide pipes down the walls, because the walls were blocked off.  They had to open the walls, drill holes through the 2 x 4's and then slide the pipes through the holes. This contributed to the already foul mood between them as they tried to snake a pipe with a diameter about the size of a quarter down several feet from the attic and through a similarly sized hole.  It was a two-person job, requiring teamwork, so you can imagine how that went.

Here's hoping I never have to call another plumber for a very long time.

Plumbing Drama, Day One

Right now there are two grown men crawling through my attic, trying to snake PVC pipes down through our walls in order to bring an end to the tyranny wielded over us by our copper pipes.

Earlier, an hour into the project, we heard the word no homeowner ever wants to hear..."Oops!"

Um, yeah.  That's not where that pipe was supposed to go.

Free Day

I got the day off today because the person I was supposed to be training called in sick. Bad for her, good for me. I have a ton of stuff I need to get done around the house. My mother-in-law is coming over this weekend to watch the kids so that DH and I can get away for a day or two to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary.[ Wow. 10 years--feels like 50! -just kidding DH! ;-) ]

Anyway, I need to do some serious cleaning so as not to be embarrassed by having someone else here. I am not a neat-freak, but the house is usually not a chaotic mess either...well, most of the time that is. When someone is going to actually be preparing meals in your house, using the shower, and maybe using the washing machine, it requires a much more serious approach than pulling the shower curtain closed to hide the mildew that's trying to take over. It also means wiping down the fridge and the microwave really well, so that I can pretend that the soda that spilled in there about a month ago and congealed into a crusty mess was never really there.

I also want to paint the master bathroom. Master bathroom, that's funny. It's actually more like a small closet with a toilet and some bathroom mats. Regardless, it looks really bad. Before we bought the house, it had been a rental property. When we saw it with our realtor it looked great; new carpet, vinyl floors and paint. It was empty and ready for us to move in. The problem, that we discovered later, was that in both bathrooms the drywall where the towel racks hung had obviously been broken and repaired numerous times. It looked OK on the surface, but we couldn't actually hang anything on the walls. They had been too abused and the repairs were made with patch kits, not new drywall.

We ran into the same problem around the windows. So many people had hung various window treatments over the years that there wasn't a solid place for us to hang ours. We had to hire someone to repair them so that we could cover our windows with something other than aluminum foil.

Aluminum. That reminds me . Last night when I asked DH what the gift theme was for the ten-year anniversary, he told me it was aluminum and tin.

Aluminum and tin. I guess he'll get a beer, soda, or maybe a disposable pie plate from the grocery store. And don't even get me started on tin. Are cans still even made from tin?

If anyone has any great gift ideas made from aluminum and tin...let me know.

DH suggested an I-Mac with a burnished aluminum finish.

Sure sweetie, keep believing the dream. One day you'll get your Mac.

Grass Farmer Extraodinaire

This is what I am dealing with; a barren wasteland. Yet, my hope springs eternal as some of the grass seed, that I have so faithfully drenched with hundreds of gallons of water, has sprouted and has begun to appear on the face of the ground like green stubble--Five O' Clock shadow, the humble beginnings of a lawn.

Got Water?

Typical water bill--$65-$75.

What this month's water bill will probably be--$459,465.34

It seems the most essential ingredient to being a succesful grass farmer is an unlimited supply of water. I am expecting the water company to call me at any moment asking if we have an undetected leak, a new pool, or if we decided to try our hands at producing meth.

"Keep top 1/2 inch of soil moist. Do not let it dry out."--Those are the instructions on my fancy grass seed. If I lived up north that would be no big deal. Here, in the 90-degree Florida sun, I am having to divert the Colorado River through subterranean channels, city pipes, and my pea-green, rubber hose.

If you go to the Grand Canyon and it's dry as a bone, blame my tiny back yard.