Shower IV

Thanks to the efforts of Jeff and Neal on the grout work the shower is officially working. - not finished but functional. water comes out where it should, and drains where it ought. the lights even work.

please enjoy these artistic photos of our handiwork



The bathroom vanity arrived months ago and sits in a cardboard shroud in the living room.

I'm kinda like Gandhi

Way better than my high school 'stash

I may not be protesting British rule, but I know a little something about sacrifice these days. And though Mohandas may have sacrificed his meals to make his point - i've given up the daily luxury of hot water to make mine. A wife will only last 10 days without hot water - that means you've got a decent grace period of 9 days to get your shit together when the heater breaks, after which, you really do see the ugly side of your spouse. And this is entirely deserved. Without this doomsday clock a guy can get pretty used to showering in the sink, fa-breeze cleaning his dockers, and growing a high school mustache.

so I present my day 11 solution:
another hole in the walls and a $50 used hot water heater sourced from the "anything goes" section of Craigslist DC. Conveniently this also gave me the chance to get the installation also via craigslist support. Another $50 and this rusting beauty was sitting in my kitchen/ boiler room. and he installed it on a sunday!

9 days and counting

The occasional set backs of 'old house' ownership are often not worth mentioning, it's become assumed if not expected that occasional luxuries will break down and require a repair, re-patch, or re-abandonment... but we're now nine days into a life without hot water.

Indeed we'd become expert at re-lighting the pilot light in our ever malfunctioning hot water heater. We've broken the refrigerator, boiler and washing machine (twice), but these weekly outages were the only [almost constant] warning we would ever get. the bottom end of our tank caved in faster than a Giuliani Presidential bid. I was determined not to be held hostage by the first repair man that showed up - but when that repair man missed 3 consecutive days of appointments and then came back with a $5100 estimate, my cleverness was undone.

we're going to go with the guy on craigslist with a used water heater for 50 bucks - and he'll install it. tough to pass on that one.

Part III

The stone for all the tricky bits has arrived. We're using a the same stone for all of the thresholds, counter tops and odds and ends where tile becomes a nuisance.
bench in the shower. cutting these tiles is giving me grey hairs.

The bathroom cabinetry has shown up. In the perpetual attempt towards life-beyond-our-means we had the cabinets built by a professional cabinetmaker in Baltimore - cause seriously, I can't do this kind of thing.

ETA has the Tile-work train pulling into done-station sometime during March-madness at this rate.