* I bet she has never heard that before.

This morn­ing we headed over to the plumb­ing show­room we vis­ited on Mon­day after­noon with all inten­tions of buy­ing the final pieces for our remodel job. The woman who spoke to us then, greeted us warmly and asked if we were her 10 o’clock appoint­ment. Ahhh, no. We spoke to her a bit before her 10 o’clock arrived. As we started to leave she asked if we would like to make an appoint­ment, “How’s Mon­day sound?” Not good we replied, how about today? She said she was all booked up, but could squeeze us in between 12 & 12:30. Donna said, “We’ll see you then.” Gee it would have been nice if this wasn’t the first time we heard the word appoint­ment from her…

We left the park­ing lot and turned right, drove 20 yards and turned left into Aiken’s other plumb­ing show­room store. The first time we vis­ited here a cou­ple weeks ago we didn’t get much help because the woman who nor­mally “manned” the show­room was out sick. Rhonda was back, fully recov­ered from the flu, and hov­ered respect­fully as Donna and I and our lit­tle tape mea­sure wan­dered the floor ever hope­ful in our quest for a small short one piece toi­let. Noth­ing fit (pun intended) the bill. There was one toi­let that intrigued us though, it was tall, but very nar­row and as a bonus it was a com­fort height model. Of course, it didn’t match our exist­ing sink which we were plan­ning on keep­ing, but what a coin­ci­dence, right next to the toi­let was the match­ing pedestal sink. Rhonda told us it was real rea­son­able, like maybe $200. Donna shrugged and said, “Let’s get it. What’s an extra cou­ple hun­dred buck.” I’m think­ing to myself all of the pos­si­ble Miata acces­sories I could get with two hun­dred dol­lars, but say out loud with enthu­si­asm (and wis­dom), “OK!” We then quickly agreed on the sec­ond toi­let and a tub, pretty much sight unseen.

The two pieces for the small bath­room are from Mansfield’s Waverly Col­lec­tion. You can see them in this pic­ture stolen from the company’s web site. So caught up in the whole con­sum­ing thing we didn’t think to check how big the sink was. The Waverly toi­let is a lot nar­rower than our cur­rent piece, but the sink is 4–1/2″ wider than the one we have now. We are now going to end up with about an inch and a half between toi­let and sink. Mov­ing the toi­let rough in would be cost pro­hib­i­tive, but depend­ing on stud loca­tion maybe we can get the sink moved over a cou­ple, three inches.

Rhonda will be call­ing me at work on Mon­day to give me pric­ing and avail­abil­ity. Hope­fully we can get the first toi­let and sink in a hurry because the con­trac­tor will be start­ing work on Monday.

The small bath­room has been gut­ted. The gen­e­sis for this project was the fact that the pan under the tile shower was leak­ing. Turns out there was good rea­son for that, there was no pan. Appar­ently 55 years ago they just slapped a very (and I mean very) thick layer of “mud” and laid tile on top of it. As a mat­ter of fact the whole bath­room floor was unortho­dox. Instead of just ply­wood over joists there is a kind of lathe over the ply­wood sub-floor that was then cov­ered with an inch and a half of the same mud, then the tile on top of that.

The file upload­ing that I thought I had fixed yes­ter­day is still giv­ing me prob­lems today. I found another workaround, but for some rea­son I didn’t need it tonight because after a cou­ple of failed attempts to upload the pic­ture, some­how it was there and usable. I guess I should have read the forums before upgrad­ing, but it seems that before releas­ing 2.5 into the wild some­one would have noticed that the media uploader wasn’t work­ing right.

I also found a hack to take the place of the plu­gin I was using to keep the Joke cat­e­gory entries from show­ing up on the front page. I added a cute one today — The Golden Screw. In spite of the title, it is actu­ally PG rated…

I for­got one item that should have been included in the Sat­ur­day Snip­pets post — A Fool And His Money Are Soon Parted.

We bought some dou­ble towel bars for the “big” bath­room the other day at Lowes. Trou­ble is we weren’t I wasn’t think­ing. The towel bars are mounted behind the door, so because the dou­ble bar sticks out from the wall so far it wouldn’t allow the door to fully open. Tonight we went back to swap them out for a cou­ple of sin­gle towel bars.

When we walked up to the returns desk the woman looked at me and asked, “Are you Brian?” She didn’t look famil­iar. I looked down to see if I was wear­ing my MMC Jacket which has my name embroi­dered on the front, I wasn’t. My name isn’t on the receipt any­where… How did she know my name?

Donna was wear­ing one of these Ash Grey T-Shirts.

Just need to grout the white tiles on the sep­a­ra­tor between the bath­room & the shower area. Next step is to put up the bead board on the walls. Toss in some fix­tures and we are almost there.

I swapped the inserts on the van­ity faucet and now three fourths of the bath­room faucets work the same — in is on and out is off.

The instruc­tions for installing these units actu­ally spec­ify that they work the way they did yes­ter­day, so Mr. Con­trac­tor had installed them right. What about the shower/tub faucets? Were they installed right? Who knows, I didn’t save those instruc­tions, but I’m bet­ting they were installed just the way the Price Pfis­ter wanted them. So why would they turn the oppo­site way from sinks? I guess we’ll never know.