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Renovation: Bathroom Blues
My father had some very good qualities, but when it came to renovating the house in a timely manner, he seemed to have several things going against him. For instance, as a policeman, he worked shift work. Shift work can lead to sleep deprivation, which is especially trying when one is trying to sleep off-hours with dogs, cats, birds, and kids running around the house. In his job, he often dealt with some energy-draining situations. Let’s face it, being a policeman in some cities does not bring one into contact with the finest folks in town. He also tried to get as many “union jobs” as possible to scoop up the extra pay. Union jobs were basically where the police officers could be hired as security for companies. For instance, the local McDonald’s franchise liked to keep spaces open in their parking lots for active customers, which could be difficult on Friday nights with teenagers hanging out. So, they would hire off-duty police officers to walk the lots and keep the kids moving. Poor sleep habits, lots of overtime, and dealing with the dregs of society and teenagers (but I repeat myself) did not make Dad the most energetic guy when he was at home. He wasn’t champing at the bit to keep the house in shape or renovated.
My mother was not someone who believed in nagging. Nagging takes more energy than just doing something for oneself, if one actually has the skills to do it. But my mother really did not have the skills to renovate a room well, but after asking nicely a few times, she just got tired of waiting.
I don’t remember the exact year, although I would guess we had been in the house for at least ten years. When we moved into the house, my eldest brother was seven; my middle brother was four or five, and I was three. My mother decided she wanted the bathroom renovated. It had been an ugly pink color, and had seen hard wear with five people, especially three growing boys. It at least needed a good coat of paint. Updating the fixtures would be good, too, since the tub enamel was chipped and for God’s sake, they were all pink! It also had a flooring of patterned tile that had various shades of small pink and white tiles inlaid where many of the small tiles had come loose and been lost over years of abuse.
I came home from high school one day to find my mother and the lady next door in the bathroom. They had put down a dark blue shag carpet over the old tile, without pulling the old tile up or installing padding. They were painting the room blue. This was not done in a professional manner. There was tile up the wall from the tub, for instance. Unlike the floor tile, it was a consistent white with a black edge border frame. At least, it had been when I had gone to school. When I returned home from school, it was a uniform light blue in color, the same as the walls.
My mother and Mrs. Next Door were not capable of changing out the fixtures, so this sea of blue was still accentuated with a pink tub, pink sink, and pink toilet. My mother had, however, bought a toilet tank and seat cover to match the carpet they had “installed.”
My father woke up from sleeping to get ready for work that evening. He got up, probably smelling the drying paint fumes, and traced the smell down the hall to the bathroom. Now, I mentioned that my father had some very good qualities, but he also had some not-so-great qualities. The same sleep deprivation factors that led to his not being energetic for renovation projects also led to his having a rather short fuse. He was also an only child who was terribly pampered and spoiled by his mother, meaning he lacked in some areas of character development until he was in his fifties or sixties. No two-year-old or modern college student or professor could out-tantrum my father. He had also been in the army and taught how to shout by drill sergeants. Generally, these were not a good combination of traits when something went wrong or did not go his way.
So, there my father was, staring into the bathroom. My mother came down the hall to stand beside him.
Instead of screaming, surprisingly, he asked a question, “What happened here?”
“I have asked several times for the floor to be fixed and the room to be painted. You do not seem to have the time to do it, so Nancy and I did it.”
My father nodded, showing amazing restraint, “That probably is not the right type of paint for the window trim and, uh, why did you paint the tile?”
“We did the best we knew how,” my mother said and stepped around him to continue down the hall.
Again, my father merely nodded. He went into the bathroom and got ready for work.
For a few years, until my father did get the time and energy to renovate it properly, that was our lavatory: a sea of blue and pink. The paint did not hold very well to the tile Mother had painted, as one would expect, so it slowly peeled away to reveal the old white and black pattern. Dad also learned that when Mother said she wanted something done, that it would get done, for good or ill.
Do y’all have any stories like this? Have you been involved in renovations gone wrong?
Published in Group Writing
When I was a baby and my parents were in their 20s, they did some do-it-yourself remodeling and my mom accidentally sealed her wedding ring up inside a new wall.
Bet that was interesting. Did they tear up the wall and have to redo it?
That reminds me of a flatmate and his girlfriend. He had gotten her a ring with a pearl. She had been visiting and washed her hands in the lavatory. The pearl dropped off and rolled down the drain. I came home and found them panicking over this. Having done many projects with my father, I knew a lot about home systems, including plumbing. I opened the cabinet below the sink. The plumbing was fairly new PVC, so I just unscrewed the trap, took it out, and poured it out into a bucket, retrieved the pearl, and then re-installed the trap. They were amazed and, needless to say, delighted to have the pearl back.
I can’t remember. I know she didn’t lose her engagment diamond ring because I have it now.
I got a very good deal on my house, because it was twice foreclosed. The people who bought it on the first foreclosure were planning to remodel it and then flip it, so they gutted the place and started into their redo. Luckily, they quickly ran out of money and abandoned the project.
They had started in the bathroom. Instead of new tile they bought vinyl sheeting made to look like tile, and then they stapled to to the walls, along with a vinyl tub that was installed with similar expertise. They only did two things right. First, they hired someone else to put in new windows all around the house. And they bought new toilets that my guys reinstalled.
(No, I didn’t do any of the work. My best contribution was to keep working to pay for it.)
A man’s gotta know his limitations.
Sorry Clint, but that was three years before I retired. I was already working 80-100 hours a week. I had three guys doing more than full time for four months. By the time I retired I was mostly dead, so if I hadn’t hired workers, I probably would still be working on it.
(This was a major job. Everything new throughout, except the roof that I did last year.)
These are all great stories,and especially a warm, knowing look at Arahant’s family: his mother’s impetuous redecorating, and his father at a moment when, what do you know, folks, he admirably showed the restraint and maturity that does not come easily or early to most men. It’s a fine vignette of how husbands and wives manage to sigh and adjust to each other’s lovable features and foibles.
Plus I have to say I’m jealous of Judge’s experience of having a house rebuilt to your own specifications, like a demented colossus decreeing acts of incredible physical tangibility: “And I say, move the wall out to here! No, come to think of it, here! To future proof it forever, I insist that analog RGB component wiring be strung through those walls, along with standard RG11 telephone wire connected to a 56K modem in each room”.
My specs were more along the lines of choosing grout colors like tan and black that won’t show dirt.
Good move.
Well, those are limitations, aren’t they?
Your family sounds amazingly like mine, except we made sure we didn’t have three teenagers in the house at the same time. Everyone knows cops have limited practical abilities (that’s why they’re cops), and I was no exception. My wife just told what needed to be done, I told her whether we could afford it, and she hired someone to do it.
Did Miracle Max fix you up?
Mostly not.
In Dad’s case, he did have a lot of practical skills. He just had a combination of not enough time, not enough energy, and not enough desire. I learned a lot from him when he got around to things. (I’m actually writing up part 2 now.) One of the main things I learned was that it is useless and usually counter-productive to get angry at things. For one thing, things don’t care. For a second, a temper tantrum can break things, and then you need more parts and more time to fix things.
I do too. I know how to do all of the stuff I wasn’t doing. I’ve done all of it and more, though not solo.
I never said you didn’t. You seem to be very defensive about my off-the-cuff cultural referent.
I was triggered by being compared to Hal Holbrook.
I suppose that would do it. 😜
Somebody brought one of those Magic 8-Balls by the house and we asked Mom if she had a question.
“Is Dad going to finish the bathroom tile before vacation?”
It came back “Ask again later.”
You go, ArahantsMom!
Mr. She and I built the house we’re living in. So, less “reno” and more “vation.” Along the way, and after many hard knocks, we finally came to understand what @arahant’s mother seems to have known instinctually–sometimes, “done is best.”
My Dad was the do-it-yourselfer, and a very fine one he was (mostly, I think he engaged on all his projects to get away from my mother, whose nagging skills were wide, deep, and ubiquitous). It seems to have been a highly heritable trait, as all three of us kids enjoy it too (the DIY part, no so much the nagging, from either end).
But the very “pinkness” of the bathroom described reminds me most of the tiny, cheap, first house that my stepdaughter and her husband bought when their love was young and before things went irremediably sideways. It was on Pittsburgh’s South Side, and last sold for many times what they paid for it. But when they bought it from the old lady who’d lived there for half a century it was very run down, and in what was apparently her own burst of do-it-yourself-itis at some point in the past, she had glammed everything up by sticking pink Con-Tact (TM) paper (remember that stuff?) all over it. Everything. The kitchen cupboards. The bathtub. The furniture. I’m not messing.
It sounds as if that would be easy to fix, right? Just peel it off? Not so much. The stuff was so old that it shredded upon removal, like those price tags that stores don’t want you to take off the product. So it came off in tiny pieces, and when it did come off, it left behind a sticky residue like cement. Couldn’t scrape it off without damaging the surface, and too much Goo-Gone or Citra-Solv dissolved many of them and just made things worse. I’ve never seen such a mess.
We rather specialize in hopeless causes around here, and one of my favorite pieces of furniture is a little oak cabinet that I rescued from this house. It was indeed stuck all over with pink Con-Tact paper, and the adhesive residue had soaked into and become part of, the wood. It was quite the challenge to clean it up, and I would rather stick forks in my eyes than strip/refinish furniture, but it turned out pretty nicely:
PS: Lest you do think I’m messing with you, take a look here. I guess it’s a “thing,” and old Mildred was just ahead of her time. Sigh.
I’ve only ever done that (torn out a wall because something was stuck inside it) when a kitten fell down between the studs below from a partially removed bathroom floor above. It was an epic mess of lath, plaster, dust, and 100-year-old rubble. Both the cat and I were wheezing for weeks.
From that link:
I want the contact paper that they used on that wall.
Best Comment of the Year? I don’t know. Maybe.
Early in our marriage, we discovered (spectacularly) that we couldn’t even change a kitchen faucet competently, so we have not attempted any renovations of our own.
When changing the kitchen faucet, we did not tighten down what looked to us like a vent cover. It turned out the “vent cover” was a seal on the water supply line to the dishwasher, so when we turned on the water supply, we had a geyser in the kitchen.
We had a similarly spectacular contractor experience involving water, but that was outside the house, and not the contractor’s fault. A prior owner of the house had redone the water supply line from the street to the house. But, that prior owner had laid the water supply line only six inches below grade (instead of the standard 18 inches). So, when the contractor started digging for part of our project, he immediately punctured the water line, creating a geyser in the front yard. Our then small children were sitting in the driveway watching the contractor work, and they thought that geyser was great fun!
As noted above, home improvement is a major limitation of mine. So is automobile repair. Fortunately, God gave me other gifts that have allowed me to earn enough money to pay others to do what I can’t.
Our shop cat used to come inside through a hole in the foundation wall and don’t know how, but he ended up inside a wall. We could hear the muffled crying when we got in the next morning. Pulled off the wall and there he was between the studs. Also had our house cat get into the attic once when I was going up and down and wasn’t paying attention and sure enough, couldn’t find her, and she was shut up in the attic. Cats can be sneaky.
Norm Abram could probably relate (From Orlando Sentinel):
“…Although Laura was skeptical, she went along with the plan. (”What I see here,” Norm quotes her as saying, ”is the biggest unfinished project Norm has ever started!”)….
“The Abrams – including Laura’s and daughter Lindsey’s collection of exotic birds – moved into the house on July 1, 1994. A year later, bookcases remain to be built and the stairways are still the temporary plywood versions.
”No, I’m not embarrassed to say that the stairway’s not finished yet,” he says. ”I will enjoy building the stairway. It’s my therapy.
”Of course, my wife would like to have it finished. But now that we are living here, nobody is coming in to do anything in this house. I want to do it.””
Our first house in California, built in the 60s, occupied by us in the late 80s, had a couple of bedrooms that were wallpapered, in an obviously DIY job. We preferred a consistent painted look, so we started peeling – and peeling, and peeling, and…
Apparently it had been done over multiple times as the occupants or their tastes changed. One of the middle layers was a black and white op art pattern, probably from the same era as some of that Con-Tact paper. We had little bits of that [CoC] floating around the house for weeks. I have a picture of that horror around here somewhere, in case we want to remember what we’ve outgrown. After digging through four layers IIRC, we came down to the textured paint walls that had appeared smooth through the accumulated paper.
Ay ay ay!