Glad that week is over!

Last week was one of those weeks where nothing seems to go very easily.

The original bathroom vs. our quick-fix floor and paint job when we moved in.

Last Saturday, Dan and I started tearing apart our bathroom.  We planned to put down new flooring, beadboard panelling over where we took down the tile, new baseboard and chair rail, a new vanity, and paint.  In my head, somehow I thought we could do much of this work over a three day weekend.  I don’t know how I thought we could do that, but in my head it all sounded like it would work out.  Having never demolished a bathroom before, I didn’t realize how LONG that process is.  I spent an entire day using a belt sander to try to get the old linoleum off the floor.  Basically, it took two full days of working just to get everything out, and we didn’t even touch the toilet or bathtub (those two fixtures are staying). Since we do only have 1 bathroom, I was in a bit of a rush to try to get it in at least working order again… that is one downside of DIY-ing and 1 bathroom living (other wise, we don’t have much need for a second bathroom, but I didn’t really realize how inconvenienced I would be without a sink and mirror for a week!)

What a mess!

Our bathroom obviously has hardly been touched since it was originally installed, and as a result, we found a number of “issues.” There had been a leak behind the faucet of the tub, a leak under the sink… all of which had gotten repaired at sometime but never properly cleaned up, which meant Dan and I had a lot of really gross clean up to do.  I think this is one of the downsides of buying a house that had been used as a rental for 20 years or so.  Things get patched and mended, but nothing gets done right.  Tenants may not tell landlords about an issue until it’s really out of hand.  Case in point, here’s what we found after we pulled out the old vanity.  A nice big hole in the floor, mildew, and other unnamed horrors.

EWW! Glad to have this taken care of!

Front page of our local news paper…. from 1981!

One of the biggest problems we ran into was installing our vanity and sink which was from Ikea.  Finding a reasonably priced vanity is not easy, and we looked all over.  I wanted something a little different and because our bathroom is quite large, we needed something that was proper scale for the space.  At the same time, we didn’t have much money to spend on this project so Ikea seemed like the best bet.  Something we (stupidly) didn’t account for is that our plumbing comes straight out of the floor.  I’m not sure why we didn’t think of this, but basically all of Ikea’s vanity’s have an open bottom or are floating. In hindsight, many of the vanities that we looked at at Home Depot, Home Hardware, etc, has open bottoms.   In the end, we ended up being ok.  My genius husband turned some pipes, worked a little magic, and voila! The the plumbing sits perfectly in the space behind the drawers and unless you get down on your hands and knees, you can’t even see the pipes underneath.  This did make attaching the sink plumbing quite a bit more challenging, but luckily my husband is basically a genius and figured out how to make it work.  I couldn’t even figure out how to assemble the Ikea pipes (plumbing is not my “thing,” I have learned).

The second problem with this particular Ikea sink is that it comes with special drain plumbing, which allows it to have full sized, fully functional drawers underneath.  It’s ingenious! But it also did not fit up with our pipes.  The ikea pipes themselves seem to be a slightly different size than standard.  We ended up having to go to a plumbing supply store, and they helped us find a fitting that went from 1 1/2″ to whateverthehell Ikea Pipes are.  It sounds like we aren’t the only ones who have had this problem.  I did some reading, and found another blogger with the same issue here.  So, if you decide to install the Hemnes Vanity with Rattviken sink, you’re going to need some speciality parts. That being said, it was still the cheapest & nicest vanity/sink that we could source in our area…

Ta Da!

It is nice to have a sink and mirror again! We still have quite a bit of work to do,  but I’m hoping we can finish most of it this weekend.  We are down to the trim, paint, silicone, put up some shelves, and decorate (that’s where I come in).  Oh, and that floor? I laid that myself! My first time tiling with grout… I’m pretty proud of that!

So, besides the bathroom that took over my life this week, I also am obviously working. However, last week my serger started locking up… something was wrong with the feed dog.  So I took it in and thought I’d have it back by the beginning of the week… and I still don’t have it back! Hopefully it will be back by next week.  That did put me several days behind though.  I was able borrow a serger from my aunt, but when I got it to my house, it had a broken needle! It is a White sewing machine, and I normally use a Pfaff.  The White is very different from my Pfaff.  You need Allen keys to remove the needles, the threading (to me) is quite complicated, the tension and stitch adjusters are different.  It took me almost 2 hours + you tube tutorials just to figure out how to use it! I felt like a total newbie! But, now that it is up and running, I’m getting back on track. Just about a day behind on orders… So, that is what I will be doing while Dan works on the bathroom this week.

Income tax time is also approaching way to quick, and in typical Sarah-Style I’ve left it until the last minute.  Since my serger was broken, I thought I’d work on that.  However, when I moved my Quickbooks over to my new Windows 8 computer, something happened with the date/time settings which would not allow me to import my Paypal data over as I had done in the past.  I kept getting a message that “data was NOT” imported. So I’d fiddle with the file, try again, etc.  Pretty soon I had hundreds of duplicate transactions,and entire weeks missing! I went to restore from my last back up, but when I did that, many of the transactions were still there, which totally make no sense.  I spent two and a half days trying to figure this stupid thing out.  I called paypal about the errors who said it was Quickbooks fault.  I called Quickbooks who said it was a problem with Paypal’s files. I tried a third party software (who actually has amazing customer service), and was still having issues.  Finally, I proclaimed “F*%# YOU!” and gave up.  Now, I am trying to use Wave, which looks perfect for my accounting needs, but I still can’t connect my Paypal Account.

So, this week is one of those weeks where I had a number of things to do, and as a result of equipment failure, I’m feeling stressed and overloaded.  On the upside, I will soon have a nice, clean, new bathroom. We have a play date with the Pug group at an agility center.  Oliver is nervous of other pugs (I chalk it up to him being self-conscious about his unusually large size), but loves the equipment.  And, it’s Dan’s birthday on Monday! I won’t say how old, but I will say, the best think about being with someone older is you always feel young in comparison (haha!).   Hope everyone else has had a less frustrating week!