Built-ins: Conclusion

This is Part 3 of an occasional series on built-ins. You can also read Part 1 and Part 2.

When we left off, it was the end of day 2 of the built-ins project, also known as Sunday. We still had a lot to do, namely, making the tops of all of the boxes and adding the decorative fireplace elements to the bookcase side, as well as scribing that side to the wall. We also had a few random things to do, like building a box for the electrical outlet to be installed in the bottom of the entertainment center. But we had run out of weekend.

 Paul graciously offered to come up a few days later on Wednesday to finish it up, and I heroically skipped that day of work. We started early and soon had the tops of the right two boxes done. The only real crisis point of the day came when we both got hungry around 11:00 or so: do we suffer until lunch, eat a late breakfast, or say to hell with the conventional lunch hour and get a bacon chipotle cheddar cheesburger thing from Burger King? Need a hint? I don’t take care of my body! So burger for me, while Paul opted for the late breakfast sandwich from Dunkin Donuts.

 Fueled by grease, we finished up 99% of what was left that day. Paul actually came back the next morning by himself to do the outlet box. But in the meantime, we headed back to the old place to see Erin and the girls and drink some whiskey to toast our successful project, then a few more glasses for good measure. Thanks again, Paul. I learned a lot and really enjoyed spending the time working with you on this project.

 In the following few days, Erin painted the entire thing (I pretended to help with one of them for a few minutes once) and I made the shelves to go inside the entertainment center and the fireplace side. The whole thing came out great if I do say so myself, which I do since I can take very little of the credit (not even the photo credit for this picture):

Photo: Erin Harris

Fixing a Hole

How to repair a shower that’s leaking into the laundry room below.

1. Squint up at the exposed tub enclosure from below. For a long time. Aim a flashlight up there. Mutter. Position a bucket underneath the steady drip of water and hope it’s just condensation or something. It’s been pretty humid out.
2. It’s not condensation. And it’s leaking a lot more now. Conclude, based on a “gut feeling,” that the problem is the diverter, nestled in the wall behind the shower. (IMPORTANT: Get your spouse on board with this finding. It’s definitely the diverter.)
3. Get out your sheetrock saw and start indiscriminately cutting into that wall behind the diverter. Make sure to make the hole big enough!
   
4. The diverter is bone dry. It wasn’t the diverter, you now realize. Stare despondently out the window, into the fading twilight, at your goddamned patchy yard.
   
5. And anyway, what if it was the diverter? What were you going to do about it? What, are you a plumber now?
6. It has to be the diverter. You just cut that big hole, which is going to be a huge pain in the ass to patch, and it’s not like you don’t have a million other things to do around here. Feel the diverter. Does it feel wet? Or is it just cold from the water inside? You can’t tell! Ask someone to come feel this. Say, “well, I know--that’s what I thought too, but it looks dusty and dry.”
7. It’s definitely not that kick stop drain you put in, you know that for sure.
8. Calm down, you just need to isolate where the leak is coming from. Run the tub into another bucket, so that the water doesn’t go down the drain. Run downstairs and look for a leak. Go back upstairs. Leave the tub off, but now dump the bucket of water down the drain.
9. You still can’t tell where it’s coming from. Keep putting water into buckets and dumping them out. You’re sick of running up and down the stairs now, so just yell “is it leaking?” Then, “did you say ‘yeah’ or ‘nah’?”
10. Well, it doesn’t help that there’s a huge gap between the tub spout and the wall, and that the underside of the spout is so gunked up with minerals and mold and other junk that the water is just running right down the underside and into the wall.
    
11. Wait, your daughters’ beautiful faces were like inches away from that spout when you were giving them all those baths, remember?
12. Go to the store, buy a strap wrench, and the wrong spout. They didn’t have the exact right one but you figure you might be able to make this other one work. You can’t. Go to a different store and get the right one.
13. Remove the old spout with the strap wrench. Put a fat roll of plumber’s putty on the back of a decorative ring (which you should have bought at one of those stores), and slide it over the water pipe. Put the new spout on and tighten with the strap wrench, which you’ll never use again because won’t need it for a while and when you do, you’ll buy a new one because you’ll have forgotten that you had to buy one for this project.
    
14. Put a bead of caulk around the diverter handle plate and the temperature control plates. Because you’re still not convinced that the diverter is 100% innocent in all of this.
    
15. The caulking tube says to let it dry overnight, but give your kids a bath a couple of hours later anyway. Keep asking them to not splash.
16. Leave the bucket in place for a week, because you’re still not convinced it’s not leaking anymore. But it’s not. I guess you fixed it, hopefully.
17. (Optional) Vacuum up the dust from step 4. Keep talking about how you need to patch that hole up sometime soon.

It’s just that simple!