Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Hey, How've You Been?

I was sitting here composing a Facebook mini-rant about magazines and websites that don't post nutritional information for their recipes (what is UP with that, Real Simple?) when it occurred to me that I hadn't posted in a while.  I'm not going to post an extended rant here, but suffice it to say that people really should at least say how many calories, fat grams and carbs are in the recipes.  Websites like SparkRecipes have free recipe calculators.  It's what I use to find out the info when I don't have it for a particular recipe, but I think it's ridiculous that things like Real Simple magazine and FoodNetwork.com don't include that type of information already.  It's not like people won't cook that food if they see the nutritional information, since many people don't really care about their calorie intake, anyway, or can afford indulgences here and there.  But for those of us who do care, it would be nice if we didn't have to do the work ourselves so much of the time when it's readily available information for those who are printing the recipes.

Okay, so that was sort of a medium-sized rant.  I'm sure you can deal with it.

We're in the midst of Ye Olde Unplanned Bathroome Renovation.  I think it's going well, but what do I know?  Yesterday was day 1, which involved ripping stuff up, basically.  The toilet was removed (and placed on our front porch - as James said "Take that, HOA!"), old linoleum came out, the old tub and shower surround came out, and the damaged portions of the subfloor were cut out.  Today, they cleared out the debris from the removals, cut the hole in the laundry room ceiling to take out a little more that was damaged and give it a nice square-edged area for replacing, installed new subflooring, put in some new 2x4 supports behind where the shower head will go and attached that piping to it and put in the new tub, which appears to now be connected to the drainpipe.

I'm not sure what's next when they get started again tomorrow, but I'm really hoping the shower surround and hardware go in, because I'd like to see that coming together.  I don't know what else they might need to get done before that, but I'm pretty sure they'll be getting to that at some point during the day.  I'd absolutely love it if they got the surround in and secured and the plumbing things all connected and the tub and shower caulked, but that may be too much to hope for.

By the way, we found out that the tub and surround were not cracked.  There were two issues that combined to basically thrash the subfloor and require replacement.  One was not enough wax rings under the toilet, which caused the one ring to deteriorate over time and prevent the seal from being complete.  The other was something that the builder apparently did when installing the tub, which was to fail to properly seal off a spot where 2 pieces of pipe were connected.  There's an inner pipe and an outer one; the inner would overflow into the outer spot, which could hold a certain amount.  If showers were short enough, the water would just go back down and be eliminated.  If showers were longer, the water would fill up the outer pipe, too, and overflow that, resulting in the drip that we were seeing rather severely with some showers and not at all with others.  So at least we found out the mystery and this should indeed fix the drip there permanently.  Our tub was technically okay, but it's 32 years old and getting rusty, so it would need replacing in the nearish future and the contractor recommended taking care of it now.  We concur since it wouldn't save much, with labor to put back in the old tub probably being about the same as the new one.  And this way we were able to get a tub that's a little bit deeper and roomier but still fits into the same footprint.

I was going to talk about more things, but now this post is already really long, and I'm not sure anyone is even still reading this.  Are you?  At any rate, I'm also tired and am going to wrap it up and move on.  But I'm sure I'll be back again soon.

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