Current plan, then

So now that the tub surround is done, my carriage house list looks like this:

1. Carriage house livability


• Bathroom
• Attach and plumb vanity
• Touch up paint on walls and paint the trim


• Windows
• Front windows
• Remaining two 28"x54" (kitchen and bathroom)
• Trim on bedroom window and window 2


• Hook up washer and dryer
  
  
  • Plumb the hot and cold over to the laundry area
  • Drain
  • Electrical work: one 110 outlet for the washer, one 220 for the dryer
  • Take a dryer vent through the wall to the outside
  • Put in a utility sink, too, as long as there's plumbing going on


• Cleaning
• Finish mopping ceiling and walls in bedroom and front room


• Paint all external trim

Looking a little more doable. Which is logical, given that time is passing, but still.

The overall plan at the moment is to make the carriage house livable, then start on the big house. There's still some carpet to remove over there, and the vanity in the blue bathroom - that has to be done soon so I can return the dumpster - but so far, it's just in a holding pattern for now.

There has been some discussion of renting an apartment due to the relative non-livability of the carriage house at the moment; that's still up in the air, but my sister happens to have a one-bedroom place available within easy bicycling distance and doable (but not terribly practical) walking distance, so it might work out pretty well for everybody. But I still feel that the best to-do list remains to get the carriage house to a nice basic condition, for resale value if nothing else. I've put maybe $1500 into this so far (not including the two dehumidifiers and the air conditioner, all of which can be reused or resold elsewhere). I'm pretty sure that if I didn't have to sell the house within the week, like the bank did when I bought it, I could at this point get a good $25,000 out of it even without getting the rest of the plumbing working. If I finish the carriage house windows and trim and plumb the big house, I figure that's going to go up to at least $30K, maybe even $40K if I'm not in a hurry. So there's very little downside here.

But take heart, Gentle Reader. I'm currently betting it's not going to come to resale.

Tub surround

Now that's a tub surround. It's amazing how much nicer it makes the bathroom look. OK, it draws the eye to the stained bathtub and damaged paint, but it looks like a bathroom instead of that Mexican-prison look.

I also got the vanity set in place (a different vanity, by the way; my wife vetoed the pedestal in favor of a little more storage space in this somewhat storage-space-challenged apartment). The crossbar in the back was, of course, half an inch too low to fit over the hot water supply (or a quarter-inch for the cold), so I had to cut notches into that. Before plumbing it, I want to attach the bowl firmly to the wall, but I'd say the vanity is 40% done.

So the list is definitely getting shorter!

Blocked at every turn

Thinking to set one of the new front windows into the frame in place of the board, I unwrapped it and cleared out what remained of the old top sash - only to find that the sill has warped a little, and the right edge of the window is about 1/8" too big to fit into the frame. So I'll have to plane the sill down to get that window in. Disappointing, but I'm still pumped about how nice it's going to look.

Kitchen

That's better.

Tub surround II

Here's the first third of the tub surround. Turns out the back wall isn't particularly close to vertical, so I had to carve a slant into the back of this panel. And I foolishly assumed that one tub surround kit would be sufficient for one tub surround (three tubs of adhesive, one tube of caulk). I used two tubes of adhesive on this one panel, which is one-fourth of the total area of the tub surround.

So this panel took far longer than I'd hoped, and I ran out of adhesive, so that's as far as I got day before yesterday on tub surrounding. My son asked with some apprehension whether the masking tape was permanent. I assured him it just holds the panel on the wall while the glue is setting, and he was greatly relieved.

Note the strip of ugly old adhesive along the right edge. Fortunately, that stuff scrapes off pretty easily.

Anyway, yesterday we shopped a lot for various things required for a household, as opposed to a house, and so no more progress was made on that front. I did start installing the front windows (hoping to get a little breeze into the south side) but it turns out I'm going to have to plane the sill down a little; it's warped slightly, just enough that I can't get the pocket replacement in on the right window. Ah, well. Onwards.

Tub surround started

Having returned from New York, I spent most of the day standing around in Lowe's and Menard's, waiting for things to be obtained for me (the new front windows, and the tub surround, respectively; the windows do in fact look pretty snazzy with the grid between the panes).

The hard part of the tub surround is complete - getting the old silicone caulk off the tub. That stuff was effective, but was very poorly applied and looked horrible. The new surround will be much better; pictures tomorrow.

Interesting tidbit: from the different colors of glue visible, I can tell you that this will be the third tub surround in this apartment; fourth if you count the original tiles. (The original tiles are cheap plastic, by the way. Slated for replacement sometime.)

Bathroom's clean

Which is good, because the family will be at the airport tomorrow. Or, actually, today at this point. The "overall thorough mopping" is also complete. Which leaves oh so much to do.