Nailed It!

I'm sure you've seen them, memes on social media where someone was trying to reproduce something they saw and it didn't turn out quite right.

This is kind of like that.  I've tried numerous times in the past to get photos of snow flakes, I think they're beautiful.  But they're tiny, and they don't last long.  Conditions have to be just right to get any kind of picture at all, much less a real good one.  And yet, you see them now and then...

So this morning, as I walked out to the car to go to church, there on the side of the car was a single snow flake, all by itself.  And it looked to be pretty much intact. It's hard to tell because they're so tiny. And, because it was only 9 degrees, it was still there, just sitting there, not melting away super fast like they so often do.  So I took a picture of it.

I didn't really know how good it was until I looked at it a little later, up close.  All in all, I think it turned out fairly well.  The photography is okay, the flake itself was somewhat hammered, but it was hard to tell seeing it there, sticking to the side of the car, all tiny like snow flakes are.  But, even though the actual snow flake isn't a pristine sample, I thought the photo turned out pretty well.  At least, it's the best I've ever gotten.  So we'll keep trying and who knows, may some day ...

The Bathroom

A while after we moved into our current house we noticed a couple of cracks in the bathtub  The one in the back of the tub may have been there when we bought the house.  I'm not sure, I didn't notice it until we'd lived here a while.

The one in the front happened when something was dropped while someone was taking a shower.  We're not going to get into who that might have been.  That's a hazard with bathtubs, I guess.  

Neither of them was very big and we never saw any evidence of them leaking.  The bathroom is above our unfinished storeroom so if it had been leaking you'd think we would have seen wetness in the basement.  But we never did.  So we made a mental note that the tub needed replacing but that's not a simple thing.  Especially since the tub was a single piece and would have had to have been installed when the house was being built, there's no way it could have been maneuvered into the bathroom after it was finished.  It was just too big.  And that meant getting a new one in was also going to be tricky business.  Way beyond my expertise; we were going to have to hire it done, which meant it was going to be expensive.  And so it waited.

Until a short while ago, the time to replace it had finally arrived.  While we have lived here we have painted and changed all the fixtures in the bathroom except the tub.  Now it was finally time for the tub.

On the day it was scheduled to be replaced we took a last look around and then took all the stuff down to get it out of the way.  This was to be an oft repeated process.

Early the morning of the replacement the plumber showed up and we were ready.  So they got to work.  First they took out the old tub.  They had to cut it into pieces to be able to get it out.

Then they brought in the new tub, also a piece at a time.  The whole process took most of the day.  

But at the end of the day we had a new tub.  Although it didn't look very pretty, it was usable.  We were very glad of that.  We only have the one shower/tub in our house so this was it.  The new tub was also slightly smaller than the old one.  That meant we were going to have to do some work on the walls and floor to take care of the gap left by the difference in size.  That also meant this job was going to be a little bigger than a simple switch out in tubs.

First step was to patch the gap in the drywall around the tub.  Across the top and at both ends.  That took a few days after all the patching, sanding, redoing, sanding, more redoing, and finally the texture coat that finished the drywall work.  There was a day's drying time between each step.

The next step was taking up the old flooring.  Couldn't do a simple patch, we had to take up all the flooring so it could all be replaced.  A "matching" issue.  Yeah, we've dealt with that before.  

Then, while the floor was up, it was time to paint.  That meant taking everything out of the room.  That included the closet because we wanted to get it painted as well.  So during the painting time, when you got a shower you had to remember to stop by the bedroom, where all the stuff was, to grab a towel and whatever else you needed to get your shower. There was more than once somebody had to be rescued: "Please bring me a towel!"  Yeah, such fun.

Then it was time to paint, which went pretty good except that the painter forgot to do the closet.  More on that in a minute.

With the paint on it was time to put the new flooring down.  That went pretty good.  With both the paint and the flooring, we had to go pick it out and have it ready for when it was time to put it on.  That wasn't so bad.  And it's always fun to pick new colors for a room.  

Once the flooring was done it was time to put all the "accessories" back on the walls.  Things like the shelves, hooks, and stuff.  In the process of all this work we also finally replaced the light fixture in the ceiling.  It had been desperately in need of replacing, it was all rusty and such but it was also an odd size (the fixture itself was an odd size but so were the light bulbs, they were a specialty size and expensive, and because the fixture was bad they kept burning out real fast). We have been looking for years for a new fixture but because of its size and position on the wall, we hadn't been able to find one that fit, let alone one we liked.  So while we were having drywall work done, we had the hole worked on and got a new light fixture.

So, yeah, the painter missed the closet.  But it was such a small amount of space and we've painted plenty of times before we decided to just do it ourselves rather than make a stink and call the painter back.  So one morning Brombeere put on her paint clothes and did the closet.  

Then we finally we were able to move everything back into the closet.  That included a thorough cleaning.  This is where we keep our medicine; we found some in there that expired in 2013.  Yeah, so it's good to go through and clean out the bathroom closet now and then.

We also replaced the mirror in the bathroom.  The old one was starting to get a little rust and corrosion on it, it also has been in there since we bought the house so long ago.  So this whole process took two months from when they took the old tub out until today, when the painting was dine, and cost quite a bit more than we originally estimated but it's so nice to have it done.  The down side was that all these workmen wanted to start at 8:00 am.  We had to be up, showered, and have the room cleaned out before they got here each day, pretty hard for two old retirees.  But it was real nice that they were able to do all that work and never leave us without a shower or toilet overnight.  We never had to skip a shower.  That was especially nice.