H.L. Porque no?

Posted on May 13, 2013 by The Boy

[That is Spanish for "D.I. Whynot?" Sort of.]

All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. It also makes a very dull The Boy and The Girl. So, for our anniversary this year we decided to treat ourselves a little bit. That’s right folks, we staged ourselves a little P.O.S. invasion of Barcelona, Spain!

Unfortunately, international travel doesn’t lend itself very well to traveling with The Dog, so she spent nine days with my cousin and his wonderful family. We were sad not to have her, but we knew she was in good hands.

We received this picture, with the caption, “Happy Cinco de Mayo Mom and Dad. Can’t wait to see you (don’t worry, I only had one beer…)”

Getting on our way was surprisingly easy (stay tuned…not all flights went as smoothly). While our flight attendants (is that the properly P.C. way to say that?) were RIDICULOUSLY grumpy, we found ways to keep ourselves entertained.

We ran into some family in Spain:

We visited La Sagrada Familia (after waiting two hours in the rain – totally worth it!):

Met other nice people from the states (New Jersey!):

Drank…a bit:

…a bit more:

…ok – we drank more than a bit:

We also took a cable car ride over the city:

Visited the small beach town of Sitges and frolicked on the beach:

The Girl practiced her statue poses:

She even held up a building!

One thing we learned was if your car fits through an alley, plaza, or the middle of a crowd, what you are driving on must necessarily, then, be a roadway. I took a few photos to document this phenomenon:

And before we knew it, it was time to go. Sad faces all around. Little did we know that the adventure was just starting. We left our Barcelona apartment at 9:00 am for a flight scheduled to leave at 11:20. Bags: packed. Gifts: purchased and wrapped. The Girl and I were prepared and relaxed.

We got to the airport with an hour and a half to go. Perfect timing. We walk off the train at the airport, and proceed to the check in area. Except The Girl quickly determined that we are in the T-2 section of the airport, and now we have to take a bus to the T-1 terminal. THE BUS RIDE TOOK 30 MINUTES. Part of the trip was on a highway. Folks, if it takes thirty minutes to get from one part of your airport to another part of your airport, BY BUS…then you have two airports.

We made it to “the other part of the airport” with an hour still to go. Not optimal, but we should be fine.

“Should.”

But, no. We walked up to the check-in for American Airlines, and immediately The Girl flagged down an employee of the airline. By the time I got there, The Girl was in a panic. Apparently check-in for international flights gets cut off an hour before the flight. Well, we’re going to just barely make that deadline. And then The Girl and I realized that I have two bottles of booze in my carry on bag that are going to get confiscated. Admittedly, The Girl and I talked about this the prior evening, but we expected to get to the airport with plenty of time to swap the bottles into our checked bag.

Insert the proverbial wrench into the proverbial monkey. Or however that goes.

The Girl and I ripped open my carry on bag, and tore open my checked bag. The checked bag had all of our dirty clothes. There I sat, on the floor of an airport in Spain, throwing The Girl’s undergarments all over the check-in area. Underoos. Naked clothes. Unmentionables. It was unavoidable. We finally got the bottles into the dirty clothes, and dirty clothes into my carry on bag. Then it was time to zip up the bags, and get on our way to the gate.

Except that this was the exact second that the zipper of the checked bag decided to give up the fight. I pulled the zipper and plastic teeth went flying all over the place. The zipper exploded. Irreparably exploded. This is one of those moments when you think “Naw…this isn’t really happening. C’mon Ashton, jump out and tell me I got punked.” Ashton was nowhere to be found (generally a good thing).

End result: the carry on bag became the checked bag, and we ended up with one bottle of booze completely unprotected inside. The checked bag was now my “carry-on” except I was pretty sure this bag wasn’t going to fit in any overhead compartments.

We then sprinted to security, and then to our gate. When we got there, The Girl found out that she was “randomly” selected for “further security” inspection. She said it was invasive. She said that the female guard didn’t bother to buy her dinner first. She said the word “violated” came to mind.

Finally we were on the plane. No matter what else happened, we were going to at least make it as far as Miami. Once there we learned that the bag we tried to check with the two bottles of booze didn’t make the flight, but at that point all we were concerned with was getting home. Several hours later, our good friends Justin and Stephanie picked us up from the airport, and my cousin Stephen and his wife Tara (and their two awesome girls) had been to our place to drop off The Dog. They also made us dinner and left it there waiting for us! We had a snuggle reunion on the couch:

The next day the missing bag was dropped off by American Airlines. It smelled heavily of absinthe, and there were glass shards in the bag. The good news was that the OTHER bottle of booze made it, so we didn’t have much to complain about.

The Girl and I recharged our batteries, so that we could get back into the bathroom and make some dang progress!

Soon to come: DANG PROGRESS!

When in Doubt, Wainscot

Posted on April 23, 2013 by The Girl

I am sure plenty of people were wondering what the heck we were doing adhering plastic sheets to our bathroom walls. The idea was to avoid having to rip out and replace all of the drywall, or worse, skim coating the entire thing (I can’t even fathom doing this, given my hatred of taping, mudding, sanding, and generally anything drywall-related). To class it up, though, we added some simple wainscoting using pre-primed MDF boards and lattice. The first step was installing the baseboards, and we had a piece left over from the other bathroom renovation. Cutting a 12 foot long piece of trim alone proved to be quite a challenge, but I am the queen of improvising and being really freaking stubborn. Enter my assistant, the grill.

Our workshop a/k/a back porch a/k/a grilling area

I had to figure out what to do with the toilet valve you see on the far left, because we cut the board in half at this point in the other bathroom, cut a notch out of one side, pieced it together, and it turned out like crap. I am sure it is invisible to any visitor’s naked eye (literally, since they are likely getting out of the shower), but I see it. Every. Single. Weekday. And twice on weekends. Therefore, I devised a scheme to cut a hole to size and slide it over. The problem is that I could not figure out how to release the hole saw holder-thing (yes, the technical term) from a different size hole saw, so I could put it on the size I needed and make my cut. I thought I was doing it right, but it wouldn’t budge.

That text to The Boy went unanswered for, oh, I don’t know, about 48 seconds, and in that time I got some locking pliers, and made that hole saw holder-thing my b!*ch. Then I eyeballed where my cut was in relation to the top of the baseboard, held my breath, and hoped for the best.

Eyeballing.

The best.

I nailed it. (As in, I got it right. Then I actually nailed it.)

After the baseboard went in, I measured, cut, and nailed in the top rail. I waited for The Boy’s assistance with this, because it was quite difficult to hold, level, and nail a 9 foot long board to a wall.

We are going to do the wall covering and wainscoting on the far wall too (the one with the window) but we need to wait until we have tiled the shower. However, I desperately wanted a second toilet again, so we did the wainscoting on the other two walls so we could make that happen. The lattice was easy – just measure, cut, and nail into place. It was a little thicker than the top of the baseboard, so I cut them all at a 45 degree angle at the bottom. It looks great caulked:

Everything still needs a coat of paint, but so far, I love it. I know the baseboard is up a little too high at the end (you can see the gap at the floor), but it is a compromise we had to make that will be completely covered by the vanity.

Then came my least favorite part, installing the turtle. It is not a difficult thing, but the wax ring is gross, and I just like to forget that I had anything to do with the install. Here is The Boy pushing the turtle down to get a good seal with the wax ring:

Then we put the tank on, attached the water hose, turned the water on, found a slight leak, turned the water off, tightened a few things, and it was easy sailing from there.

I keep forgetting we have a toilet in there. Probably because there is still no door on the closet or the bathroom, so there is zero expectation of privacy. In an emergency, though, there are options. I love options.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane with a few before and during side-by-side comparisons:

What do you think? An improvement?

The NeverEnding (Bathroom) Story

Posted on April 15, 2013 by The Girl

Remember this bathroom?

I miss it. Well, not the whole thing, just the green toilet. It worked, and was the second toilet in the house. The good news is that we are soooo close to being a two toilet household again! (Cue the collective cheer – I am sure everyone is so excited for us!)

We have made some key purchases and some serious progress. First, we built a curb for our shower, which has a slightly larger footprint than the tub:

You might be wondering why we used bricks instead of 2×4′s. If you have a plywood subfloor, 2×4′s are just fine and dandy. However, with a cement subfloor, the cement absorbs moisture from the ground below and can cause wooden 2×4′s to swell. Although our subfloor stays pretty dry, we went the safe route and used bricks, which we just happen to have an excess of. We use them to line the bottom of the fence so The Dog doesn’t dig into the neighbors yard to play with their pooch. And yes, that has happened on multiple occasions, thus the bricks and expensive doggy daycare. A girl just needs a friend sometimes, right?

The actual arrangement of the bricks required us to cut one, which we debated how to do. Finally, The Boy tried an old-fashioned method – whacking it.

Much to my amazement, it worked (on the second try)! Then we used thinset to secure them in place. The nice thing about these bricks is that they have very subtle ridges, which cause them to have a very slight slope towards the shower, and will prevent water from pooling.

Once the shower curb was in place, we could tile. First we dry fit everything, and made our cuts.

Everything went fairly smoothly, until we reached the toilet flange, which we did not anticipate falling squarely in the middle of a full tile. So much for planning. Since the base of the toilet will cover much of the real estate of this tile, we cut it down the center of the toilet flange, then found a round object the right size to trace. The Boy showed off his mad tile cutting skills:

This is much harder than it might look, because you cannot cut a curve with a tile saw. Through the magic of the interwebs and photography, I will show you the final product, which actually took almost a week between cutting, laying, and grouting.

Our next project was dealing with the walls that we ripped the lovely green tile off of. I scraped and scraped and sweated and scraped until I removed all of the adhesive and loose drywall tape.

My brilliant solution was to adhere moisture resistant white panels to the wall. In order to do this, we went ahead and replaced the old valves, so we could cut smaller holes in the panel, slide it over the pipes, and then put new valves on. We were in a rush because the inspector was due to arrive any minute!

We got it done just in time for the inspection:

You passed … barely. That will cost you two treats and a belly rub.