Before I get into it, I want you to know that the bathroom looks stunning. The tile, as described by a friend, looks like a David Hockney swimming pool painting. The radiator, blasted free from 100 years of bad color choices, is a showstopper that makes the other radiators in the house blush with shame over the haphazard way they've been painted through the years. The bathtub, it turns out, has little flowers on his cast iron claw feet. To top it all off, all my plumbing is now new copper from the taps to the main and the water is no longer brown. The hot water comes up almost instantaneously. I am not exaggerating when I say I used to turn on the shower, make coffee, and come back to find the hot water just coming up.
THIS is home improvement. It's exactly what they mean when they use those words. But these words do not explain the mystery of the contractor.
My contractor is a really nice guy. He's tall and good looking and reads a lot of interesting books. He's sensitive about art and use of space and he's absent about 75% of the time. I did not learn this lesson from the house painters, who were also really nice and good looking and absent, because I had gone camping with the husband while the house was being painted.
I though myself pretty clever for planning the camping trip during the house painting. We were home for about a week worth of prep, which was quite disruptive, and then we loaded the car. We came back to a beautifully repainted house, albeit one that was a lot greener than I'd planned. In spite of the house painters poor attendance, the job was done upon our arrival; though we had to chase them down to repaint a few places that hadn't properly been prepped. The lesson learned from that round of home improvement was not to pay the balance until everything is exactly as you want it to be.
Still, getting out of your house while the contractors are sanding, scraping, generally wreaking havoc about the place you call your home is a fine idea, so when it seemed (incorrectly so) that I could finally afford to remodel the bathroom, we once again went camping. The contractor said it would take about two weeks to do the bathroom. We planned to be camping for five. I figured the padding would work in our favor. After all, there's no way a two week job could stretch out to five, unless something disastrous happened, in which case, it was just as well to be out of the house. Right?
We'd spent the two weeks before our departure buying paint and tile. I ordered a reproduction claw foot bathtub conversion fixture on eBay. I'd made a floor plan. Dave stopped by when he was in the neighborhood to discuss things. To make suggestions that I couldn't really afford and some that I could. We agreed upon our biggest fear; that the bathtub wouldn't fit where I wanted it to go. He assured me he'd figure it out.
Dave showed up spot on time the morning we took off South for the Sierras. While we loaded the car (ice chest, sleeping bags, camp stove) Dave hauled heavy equipment (sledge hammer, heavy duty metal saws, toolbox after toolbox) up the stairs. We chatted a little about our first stop and the road around Crater Lake, which Dave, our sensitive contractor, told us looks glorious in the sunrise. We made plans to stay in touch by phone and by email and he wished us safe travels - with what I thought was a look of envy in his eyes. As we left the house, he was attacking the unfortunate sink with a really big wrench.
That may have been the last time he'd been in the house for a week. Or two. Or three even. I don't really know. I called him once every few days for the first two weeks. Every now and then I'd get him on the phone. "Oh, I'm on my way over there now," he'd say. Or, "It's all going fine. Are you having a great trip?" But at about week three, I had a funny feeling. I dropped a line to some neighbors. "Hey, I haven't really heard anything about the bathroom. Would you go take a look?" The news I got back was bad. Not much had happened there since they'd looked in two weeks before. The floors were gone, the water was off. My neighbor who'd agreed to water the houseplants was bringing water buckets from his house.
Early in week four, I got Dave on the phone. His sweetheart needed surgery for some ailment - maybe it was repetitive stress injury? and Dave needed to have a tooth pulled. I was feeling guilty for doubting him. I relaxed. Two more weeks we'd be gone, he'll be done by then, right? No problem. Early in week five, I sent him email. "Home in a week see you soon. Can't wait to see the new bathroom!"
You know what happened, right? It's not as bad as you think, though, thanks to the effects of an extended camping trip. Camping teaches you to get by with minimal facilities.
The bathtub did fit. Oh, it was tight all right, and there were some dings in the new paint from the effort of getting in, but there it is, finally where it was meant to be all along.
The first problem was that the floor isn't straight and slopes in the far corner, so the tub wasn't draining. The old filler fixture for the tub had been reinstalled, but not completely, so there was no shower. There was a hole in the wall over the medicine cabinet. The new outlet didn't work. We got in the car and drove to a friend's brand new townhouse to shower. The kitchen sink was working, after all, we'd be fine for the weekend. There was one worry: we couldn't find the new shower fixture. Maybe he'd tossed it in the car and was driving around town with it? Maybe it didn't fit and needed to be cut down in the back? We had no idea.
Dave showed up three days later, with no shower fixture, no apologies, and no explanations. He hadn't seen it, had no idea where it was. "I was sure you'd ordered one," he said, "and I opened every package that arrived, but no go." (That turned out to be the plumbing supply house. They profusely apologized and FedEx-ed it to us.) In a whirlwind of activity, he installed the sink, fixed a leak from the radiator, adjusted the bathtub, and, as an aside, tore apart the kitchen sink to see why it was leaking. When I asked him when he'd be back, he assured me it would be the following day to install feed lines for the sink and to finish up.
9 days later we stopped to talk with him as he was driving up. "One of the ferries was out. I was the first car to not get on." Nine days ago? Still, I was happy to see him. We talked about the details - the radiator had sprung a pinhole leak, the kitchen sink was still dripping, and where were the shelves for the medicine cabinet? We'd installed the sink feed lines and the shower fixture (which had finally arrived) ourselves a few days before.
There are a few things left to fix. The shelves in the cabinet are too wide and now the door won't close. The old medicine frame, which we left in place, has no shelves at all. The radiator is still not quite right - the fix looks to have almost worked, but an air bubble leaked through the glue as it dried. There's a bit of busted plaster in the bedroom, probably from the demolition work, that needs to be patched. The grout has to be sealed and the towel bars reinstalled. We're going to finish the last bits ourselves rather than try to guess when Dave will come by again.
All told, the work took about seven weeks, though I do not believe that means 35 working days. I believe it means about 10, as predicted at the start of the job. It took seven weeks because perhaps Dave was at the Contractor's Day Spa one day having his nails done. And at the Contractor's Picnic one day, chatting with the guys that painted the house for us last summer. And perhaps there were some overnights at Contractor's Mountain, a swanky hunting style lodge in the North Cascades where plumbers and drywall guys and the whole lot of them sit around eating grilled steak and talking about what they're working on. "I'm doing a bathroom remodel on Cap Hill right now. What are you working on these days, Hank? Still hanging on to that tile job? How long is it now? Six months? You're the MAN!"
The funny thing is, I'm really not that put out by it. This is either a sign of how much better my bathroom is, how nice of a guy Dave is, or what an absolute pushover of an idiot I am. I suppose it could be a combination of all three. There's also the tiny possibility that Dave's bookkeeping schedule is remarkably like his work schedule and that 9 weeks after we agreed he'd remodel my bathroom, I still have not received a bill.
