I did not paint that. It came with the house when Mom bought it, along with carpet that smelled of cat piss and ceilings painted brown to match the walls. We got rid of the cat piss carpets and brown ceilings years ago, but the coconut trees have been here the whole time. Until now.

For reasons that are completely unrelated to the fact that we're having house guests next weekend, we've decided to finally paint the solid green laundry room in tasteful Icebreaker Blue, Dutch White, and Purple Prince to accompany the Weeping Wisteria in the adjacent mud room. (You can probably imagine what blue, white, and purple look like, but do you know what color wisteria is? Hint, hint.)

Anyway, when our house guests arrive and wonder why the house smells like fresh paint, well, that's just me hiding the nuts in the laundry room.

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My toilet wasn't filling well, so I bought a new fill valve. Then I pulled the old one out and put the new one in. It all went smoothly. I didn't break anything or hurt myself. That's it. Sorry, there's no entertaining story when everything goes right.

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When I started this painting, I was trying to have it done by May Fourth. But, as a wise puppet once said, "Do or do not. There is no try." And I did not.

However, in honor of Star Wars Day, I'll make my apologies with this here recent-ish picture of the work in progress.

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Look, I know I have in the past said that there's nothing much more to a plumber's job than a willingness to enter uncomfortable small spaces and get dirty, but I'll at least admit that the secret to their job is knowing enough to enter any uncomfortably small space only once.

I, on the other hand, seem to be incapable of working on pipes without breaking something in addition to what I was trying to fix. For example, the last time I repaired the rotted drain pipes under the kitchen sink (in November 2018), I ended up needing to cut the still-serviceable sink tailpiece to get it to fit with the new pieces. But I cut it a little too short; it ended up just long enough to barely hold a washer with no room to spare. We got away with that for a while, but gravity won out eventually. So this week, when I spotted a leak for the second time in a month, I went to Home Depot, bought a replacement, brought it home, cut it to an appropriate length, went to screw it tight... and promptly broke the sink strainer basket.

Ok, technically I didn't break the strainer. I just torqued it hard enough to dislodge the old plumbers putty that was sealing it in place. Without the seal, it leaked much worse than the problem I was fixing. Too bad I didn't have any fresh plumber's putty. So another trip to Home Depot was in order.

The one smart thing I did was clean the old putty out out of the sink before getting in my car, and while doing that, I discovered that the nut holding the old strainer in place was also stripped and the whole strainer would need to be replaced. (How could that have happened? See November 2018 again.) Whew. I would have hated to have discovered that only after I came back with fresh plumber's putty. I draw the line at going to Home Depot three times in a day.

Of course, clearing out the old plumber's putty made my hands dirty, so I did what the pandemic conditioned me to do and promptly washed my hands... in the sink that was now missing both a tailpipe and a strainer basket. D'oh. No professional plumber would have made that mistake, either.

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Can you guess what my next painting is going to be?

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Someone lost their tiger in my front yard.

If someone wouldn't drag that tiger everywhere, things like this wouldn't happen.

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At long last, in the friscalating dusklight, here's SpongeBob sitting out in front of my house.

Little guy looks thrilled to be there.

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Hour three of trying to replace a dishwasher (hour one of guy grinding stumps just outside the kitchen door), and the latest problem is the new dishwasher is too short to reach the countertop so I have to find some wood to put under the feet to raise it up and to do that I need to pull it back out of the recess but first I have to turn off the water at the street again because the under-cabinet waterline spigot won't fully close but only after I start turning off the master water line at the street do I realize that since yesterday a colony of fire ants has taken residence and because of mud in the hole the master water line won't fully turn off...

So now I'm sitting on the floor in the kitchen struggling not to scratch the ant bites and poison ivy (courtesy of my dogs) on my arms as I contemplate burning the house down.

Does this shit happen to other people?

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This has nothing to do with Batman or football. It's just Mr. Spock out standing in his field.

Live long and prosper.

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 Wriphe [Official Comment]: Posted Sep. 19, 2024 at 01:10:26 AM

CamMoscatiello Posted Sep. 20, 2024 at 04:14:29 PM
EXCELLENT!!

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If you had two dolphins and I gave you eight more, how many would you have?

Afterwards, if I gave you nine more dolphins, how many would you end up with?

Mom has been working to prepare her residential rental property for new tenants, and that means overhauling the upstairs bathtub. The previous tenant used it for dying wool, and now the formerly white tub is very much not white. The tub is in such bad shape that she would probably consider replacing it if not for the fact that it is nearly a century old, made of cast iron, weighs a ton, and will never fit down the stairs. So instead of replacing it, I am resurfacing it. Or at least, I'm supposed to.

This is not a horror story about how an enamel paint job went awry. No, I haven't gotten to that step yet. This is a story about how a bathtub full of water ended up coming through the kitchen ceiling.

Step one in resurfacing the tub requires clearing away the old caulk and scouring the tub clean prior to sanding the entire surface. All of that went reasonably well. It was even surprisingly easy to remove the metal drain and overflow plate considering the tub's age and mistreatment. The problem was that all the water I poured in to rinse out the scouring cleanser somehow missed the drain pipe and instead flowed directly down the interior wall to emerge through the overhead light fixture in the kitchen below. (I wish I could show you a picture here, but I was too panicked by my discovery of the waterfall flowing from the active light fixture to take the time to grab my phone for a selfie.)

My working theory is that too much water pressure dislodged the drain pipe enough that much of the waste water overflowed the crack between pipe and tub. But given that on disassembly for cleaning, the kitchen's florescent light fixture contained what can only be called a "rust puddle," it sure looks like this leak has been dripping for a while. Considering how well the last tenant treated the tub, maybe in this specific case, it's not all my fault?

The silver lining to this otherwise very unwelcome rain cloud is that after a good mopping with every spare towel I could borrow from my aunt who lives nearby, the kitchen floor is now cleaner than it has been in ages. The next tenant might be cooking in the dark, but at least the floor is spotless!

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