The Project I Don't Want to do Right Now But I'm Doing it Because it Needs to be Done

Like the master bathroom, the kids' bathroom is falling apart.

Isaac scrubbed the shower walls several weeks ago, and as he did so, tile fell off the wall and landed on his foot.

So this happened:

I didn't want it to happen this soon, but it's happened. And that's okay. There's enough mold behind the tile that it's good it's all coming out.

Today, this happened:

I accidentally put the panel on the left on backwards, but it won't matter all that much. I have to get some thinset into the joints and let it all solidify and harden, but then it's ready for tile. Maybe we'll have better weather by then; right now it's still a bit cold to be running a wet saw to cut tile.

We're also seriously looking at a remodel of the basement bathroom as well, and I'm okay with that too. I'm wondering if I can get a shower stall there instead of another tub to clean, but we'll have to see how that goes. It would mean extra work.

The upstairs bathroom will mean extra work enough. I know I've got some subfloor underneath the toilet that's going to have to be replaced, along with the flange and bit of pipe that the toilet connects to. Not looking forward to that. I may farm it out to someone else. If I do that, that should bring an end to the occasional and far-between random leak from that bathroom into the kitchen below, so I can replace that one bit in the kitchen ceiling and be done with it. That'll be nice, if I can pull it off.

I would like to talk to the howler monkeys who framed the bathroom. There's one spot next to the tub where there should be a stud, but instead we get a stupid flat 2X4 that doesn't even go all the way down to the floor because they had to cut around an electric wall heater that they could -- and should -- have moved rather than mess up the studs. So I get to figure out how to fix that, and I'm not a fan. Buncha jerks. Cover it up quick and leave it for the next poor schlub of a homeowner to deal with when the crap job you did on the tile finally rots all the way through.

Oh well. I suppose in thirty years some other homeowner will be complaining about the crap job I've done on some of the repairs and remodels I've committed against the house. Thus is the circle of life.

Hatches Firmly Battened

Oh, today.

I guess I should count it as a lucky day. Lucky in that the weather held until I had finished everything I set out to do. And just in time -- finished up the final get-ready-for-winter chores just as the first snowstorm blew into town.

Here's what got done today:

• Replaced the windows in Lexie's bedroom.
• Removed and replaced a bit of drywall in Lexie's room, after cleaning up the mold behind it.
• Cleaned up my massive window-replacement mess.
• Cleaned the chimney.

A little story about that before I continue. I wanted to clean the chimney last weekend, because the stove has been really stubborn and smoky and not really cooperative in letting the smoke go where it wants to. In fact, when Isaac got home from school on Thursday he had to run across the street to the Rhotons because both our smoke alarm and carbon monoxide alarm were going off because the chimney wouldn't draw properly. But I couldn't clean it last week because I couldn't find my brush. So this weekend I looked again. STill couldn't find it. So I improvised a brush: I taped a gallon milk jug to the pole, after I cut an X in the bottom of the jug and turned the corners inside out. It worked like a charm. And since it worked, you know right away that ten minutes after I got off the roof, I found the damn brush on the woodpile. Oh well.

Back to the list:

• Stuffed the playhouse full of stuff from the shed.
• Moved the swing into the shed and basically got everything into the shed that needed to go in the shed.
• Stowed the camper, including putting the tarps on it.

I didn't want to do the tarps, but the thought of Michelle coming at me with her lucky machete because the chore wasn't done got me motivated enough to finish. The boys helped. They didn't really want to at first, but once they figured out that rope was involved, they got a bit more excited about it.

Still not done with my window project -- got to do the caulking and the trim wood on the inside, but at least that's something I can do while it's all nice and snowy outside. I've got some outside caulking to do, but that'll have to wait until I've got warmer weather. I did fill all the gaps with Great Stuff, so that'll help keep the moisture out.

The mold, I have to say, was gross. When I poked the moldy bit of drywall with my finger, it crumbled. So I pulled a big slab of it out and wiped things down. It smelt like 17-Mile Cave, mixed with bleach. The good news is after the bleach smell wore off, the musty smell didn't come back, so I think I got rid of the stuff. Time will tell tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Got to put the plaster on the bit of drywall, put up the trim wood, then paint. I may not paint until next weekend, as I had Michelle get too little of the trim wood to finish the job. Don't know what I was thinking, and you can't find a No. 1 1x4 in Rexburg for love or money, so it's something we'll have to pick up in IF. Maybe I should try Stock Building Supply tomorrow . . .

Watch Out for that Bar of Soap, Everybody

We started this conversation with a garage.

We've owned two houses in Madison County. Neither one has had a garage. We'd like to build one here, but we're just not sure we've got the room. Well, we've got the room, but it would take out a pretty good chunk of our backyard.

So the other option is to up and decide that we've outgrown this house and move on. But the local real estate market is pretty weak. The one house that's sold in the neighborhood was sold by a couple who owned it outright, owned another house outright, and thus could afford to discount said house heavily. We can't do that without eroding into any possible down payment on a new place.

Then there's this: There's some work that needs to be done on this house in order to make it sellable. The back deck, for one, is falling apart -- we needed to replace it when we bought this place ten years ago. And the kitchen is an ugly 1970s mess. I got to looking at kitchen cabinets today, and figure we'd have to spend between $1,800 to $2,000 to replace what we've got with a few minor additions which we counted on doing if we were going to redo the kitchen anyway -- and that excludes countertops and the floor. I can do the majority of the labor, it's just getting the money for the materials and then having to pay someone for a little bit of plumbing and the countertops; I won't do those.

Then there's this other difficulty: Once all that work is done, do we want to sell or revel in the new appearance of the kitchen? It's a slippery slope, everybody.

Who's Gobbling My Bandwidth?

I don’t want to become one of Nexflix’s rabble of helpless victims. And I don’t even use their service.

But according to Sandvine (via Slate.com), one of those really neat-o Internet companies that have a lot of acronyms and Klingonese in their “about” page (see it here) Netflix already gobbles up 20 percent of “downstream Internet traffic” in the United States, and is poised to grow even more as more and more people subscribe to their movie and TV show streaming services.

Will the nation’s broadband network hold, folks? Can it hold out? Can we resist the shiny, candy-like Netflix logo that already beckons us? Stimpy probably can’t.

Sandvine and Slate point out that, more and more, we’re using the Internet for synchronous use, rather than asynchronous use. We’re watching TV or movies as they arrive, rather than downloading them and watching when we want. We’re also using services like Skype (which I use occasionally) and other services that gobble up network bandwidth.

And that could cause trouble, according to Slate’s Farhad Manjoo and a few others he quotes:

Well, maybe there is one dark cloud: Will there be enough available bandwidth for Netflix to keep growing? Wired.com's Ryan Singel points out that in the hours when Netflix hits 20 percent of broadband use, it's being used by just under 2 percent of Netflix subscribers. That stat has huge implications for how ISPs manage their lines. If 2 percent of Netflix customers account for one-fifth of the traffic on North American broadband lines, what will happen when more and more Netflixers begin to watch movies during peak times?

The outcome might actually not be that dire. Theoretically, broadband capacity isn't fixed—as people begin using bandwidth-hogging services like Netflix more often, they'll subscribe to faster Internet lines, and that will push ISPs to build out their capacity.

In other words, they won’t really do anything to fix current capacity, just encourage us to spend more money on more capacity, and then they’ll install it for us. Given I live in the sticks where competition for broadband Internet isn’t all that good, I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve already blogged here about my difficulty in rationalizing paying for cloud storage of my photos (I’m too cheap to pay $25 a year for a professional Flickr account, for example.) And at Uncharted, we’re having a jolly time keeping up with having enough server space for our stuff. I’m beginning to think I could make some money just opening up a local server farm and finding customers. That would be an interesting adventure, because storage capacity for cloud computing, and the bandwidth to access it all, are only going to be bigger concerns in the future.