Prairie Landing
Monday, June 19, 2006
Misadventures in home repair
Ever since we bought this condo, the upstairs bathroom has been stinky. Colliculus can't smell it, guests claim they can't smell it, but I sure can. It smells like the cat pissed in a pot of mildew. We suspected the bathtub needed to be recaulked, which was confirmed by a) my mother and b) the fact that large quantities of bleach would defeat the smell for about a week. Also the fact that the caulk itself was nurturing giant black colonies of flora.
It took more than a year for us to get around to it. By "us" I mean "me," mainly because I could smell it and Colliculus couldn't. We went out and bought the caulk and the caulking gun and the scraper, and I diligently downloaded an article from the Internet, which advised that I could save $100 in 15 minutes with this simple home repair.
Step 1 was to prepare the downstairs bathroom for us to shower in it for a couple of nights (heh). This involved booting the cat's litter box upstairs. I decided the time was ripe to wash the shower curtain, producing the following result:
Step 2 was to remove the old caulk. This took about 2 hours and produced the following result:
This hole was a teaching hole. It taught me that an entire portion of the wall was teeming with water and life.
The hole spent its next 4 days under the assault of a box fan. Eventually the wall congealed. Then, after many consultative calls with my dad, I patched up the hole.
It was somewhere in this period that the big G decided he was pissed off about the litter box relocation and took a big fat dump on the carpet outside our bedroom.
After 9 days of patching and sanding and painting and caulking and recaulking where I fucked up and (mostly) waiting for the different things to dry, we have a recaulked bathtub!
Overall it still wasn't much harder than hiring someone to do it. Hiring people to do things is a big pain in the ass, because I'm willing to work on weekends and they're not, and because watching to make sure someone does a decent job is that much harder when you don't know jack about the job yourself.
That said, doing the job myself was also a big pain in the ass.
It took more than a year for us to get around to it. By "us" I mean "me," mainly because I could smell it and Colliculus couldn't. We went out and bought the caulk and the caulking gun and the scraper, and I diligently downloaded an article from the Internet, which advised that I could save $100 in 15 minutes with this simple home repair.
Step 1 was to prepare the downstairs bathroom for us to shower in it for a couple of nights (heh). This involved booting the cat's litter box upstairs. I decided the time was ripe to wash the shower curtain, producing the following result:
Step 2 was to remove the old caulk. This took about 2 hours and produced the following result:
This hole was a teaching hole. It taught me that an entire portion of the wall was teeming with water and life.
The hole spent its next 4 days under the assault of a box fan. Eventually the wall congealed. Then, after many consultative calls with my dad, I patched up the hole.
It was somewhere in this period that the big G decided he was pissed off about the litter box relocation and took a big fat dump on the carpet outside our bedroom.
After 9 days of patching and sanding and painting and caulking and recaulking where I fucked up and (mostly) waiting for the different things to dry, we have a recaulked bathtub!
Overall it still wasn't much harder than hiring someone to do it. Hiring people to do things is a big pain in the ass, because I'm willing to work on weekends and they're not, and because watching to make sure someone does a decent job is that much harder when you don't know jack about the job yourself.
That said, doing the job myself was also a big pain in the ass.
