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Tile
I'd like to remove the Mary Kay Pink from my bathroom walls.
I'm learning a lot more than I ever wanted to know about how to choose the right kind of tile, how to hang tile, how to remove old tile, what to do if what was under your old tile is not in fact appropriate for putting tile upon, and just generally how much money and time could be sunk into a seemingly simple project like this.
I do NOT trust my house. The things we've discovered...! I half expect to pull that tile off and find oh, I don't know, bare wood underneath. Or electrical wires swinging loose through standing puddles of water. Or complete lack of studs in this section of the house, for all I know. That's the kind of suspicion a person acquires after being in this house for a while.
I have also discovered that tile is incredibly frigging expensive. It's a lot worse when you go over to Home Expo Center, A Home Depot Company, where a shower door costs (I kid you not) $2500, and that's for one that doesn't actually open wide enough for a human.
In a way, I'm almost glad my bathroom is Mary Kay Pink. If it were ANY other color, I'd be thinking "perhaps that's not so bad after all," and I might just stop and live with it, but every time I get tempted to do that, the words I actually have to put together are "perhaps Mary Kay Pink isn't so bad after all," and then I hear what I just thought, and that's the end of THAT little delusion.
I'm learning a lot more than I ever wanted to know about how to choose the right kind of tile, how to hang tile, how to remove old tile, what to do if what was under your old tile is not in fact appropriate for putting tile upon, and just generally how much money and time could be sunk into a seemingly simple project like this.
I do NOT trust my house. The things we've discovered...! I half expect to pull that tile off and find oh, I don't know, bare wood underneath. Or electrical wires swinging loose through standing puddles of water. Or complete lack of studs in this section of the house, for all I know. That's the kind of suspicion a person acquires after being in this house for a while.
I have also discovered that tile is incredibly frigging expensive. It's a lot worse when you go over to Home Expo Center, A Home Depot Company, where a shower door costs (I kid you not) $2500, and that's for one that doesn't actually open wide enough for a human.
In a way, I'm almost glad my bathroom is Mary Kay Pink. If it were ANY other color, I'd be thinking "perhaps that's not so bad after all," and I might just stop and live with it, but every time I get tempted to do that, the words I actually have to put together are "perhaps Mary Kay Pink isn't so bad after all," and then I hear what I just thought, and that's the end of THAT little delusion.
no subject
Recently the inlet valve in my toilet (only one bathroom in the house) stopped functioning. I called out a plumber. The plumber tried to sell me on the joys of putting in a new toilet for not very much more money than the price of having him entirely rebuild the interior of the existing one, plus reset it (the wax ring at the base was broken, according to the pre-purchase inspection, and I'd never had occasion to have anyone out to fix it.) He about had me sold, when I said
"... but can you find another almond one?"
No, any color other than white has to be special ordered. Well, everything in that bathroom is cream and sand and brass and light oak. A white toilet would look like crap, and I said so. Several times. He rebuilt the existing one.
no subject
We had a bad wax ring in the upstairs bathroom, and when the plumber took the toilet off, he realized the flange upon which the toilet sits was actually an inch higher than the floor, so no wonder the wax was not sealing properly. Of course, the flange is PVC-ish plastic stuff, so removing it means drilling it out of the pipe it's in, and of course the pipe is also plastic, so drilling just might crack it somewhere along its length. And of course it runs the length of the house before dropping to any place accessible. AND of course the flange is an offset flange, meaning somebody screwed up and plumbed for a toilet that's farther from the back wall, so if we went that route we'd need a new toilet, too. And our toilet, you guessed it, is almond.
We replaced the wax and so far it's holding.