Home Improvement

Well, today, I had 2 of the weirder experiences in my life working on this house. The 1st may not seem so weird to you, and it didn’t to me at first either. The 2nd one however is classic, especially for this house. Here goes… The first weird thing was that Estela and I bought a bathtub for the house. We decided since we were rebuilding the shower walls and the tub was chipped up and flimsy, we might as well replace it with a tub that didn’t feel like my big bum was gonna crash through it. So after looking online and seeing some options we loaded up the truck and headed to Lowe’s. We picked up a nice enameled steel tub for a great deal and a decent surround that looks like we’ll be able to adapt to fit around the window in the shower. Anyways, as I said, it didn’t seem weird at first but after I got home I thought, “we just bought a bathtub.” How grown up of a purchase is that? “We just bought a bathtub”, just keeps bouncing around my mind. I can’t really explain why it feels so weird since we’ve been working on “our house” for like 2 weeks, but it does sink in a little when you’re pushing a cart around with a bathtub on it. Wow.

Anyways, now that I’ve put you to sleep, the second thing was that I was removing some more drywall today and was lucky enough to find this:

Dude, I always wondered what happened to the mighty trash heap...

There was a little bit of everything stuffed in this wall. There was a dinner knife, matches, a lighter, a ball point pen, a felt tipped pen, lots of chewed up gum, candy wrappers, tags from clothing, bottle caps, and tons of trash. I couldn’t believe it. This is quite possibly nastier than all the m*ld we keep finding. Seriously, what kind of animals lived here? Bunch of savages in this town, I tell you. This one ranked 5 gags on the Gag-o-meter! I don’t even want to know what might be in some of our other walls. I was just about ready to grab my hole saw drill bit and start core sampling all over our house just so I can sleep at night. Yikes! This one really blew my mind. I’d like to think that there happened to be a hole in the wall and some kid was just shoving stuff in there, but there were cigarette butts and a condom wrapper in there. Blarf!!! Here’s a shot of everything after I got it all out of the wall:

The might trash heap has spoken!!!

Well, in addition to that, dad and I got a new light fixture in the Master Bathroom. The old fluorescent was making noise even when it was off. Turns out that even in the off position the switch was allowing electricity to flow to the fixture so the ballast was making noise even when off. Nice huh? That had to go. Estela found some cute globes for the hallway lights, mom was a cleaning machine (when she wasn’t taking a scenic tour of San Diego…that’s a funny story for later.) Dad got some Drylock on the outer wall of the office and the stuff seems pretty cool. Tony dug more on the moat and I had all the trash fun. We actually are getting quite a bit done. This weekend will hoepfully bear the fruit of a new bathroom! That’s about all for today. We’ll post you later.