I’ll Drink to That

This insane remodeling project has been one step forward, two steps back, but I think we’re finally making progress. The plumbing is mostly done – still some little tweaks, like replacing the $10 flush mechanism on the toilet. We still need to replace the water heater but we already pretty much knew that, and have someone lined up to swap it out.

I was cringing when I looked at the bathroom and worried over what it was going to take to rip out several layers of atrocious wallpaper. I started to pull it out and it was taking the wall with it. Luckily looks like that issue turned out to be a lot less scary than I thought, and the fix should be pretty simple. I’m going to need to clean up a ton of crusted lime from where the old faucet sat, and in all the other fixtures.

The water here is among the hardest in the world. The muddy cow ponds in the middle of Africa don’t carry as much crud in their water as the local water supply here. It’s ostensibly clean crud, but still crud. Calcium, iron, and God knows how many other minerals mean a scrubbing marathon at least once a month for sinks and faucets, and a vinegar bath for clothes and dishes on the same frequency. It’s bad closer in to Phoenix, but this little corner of the world is worse. I used to think bottled water was the ultimate in bourgeois posing. Then we moved here and invested in a water dispenser in the house, which is the only water you can actually drink. We replenish those three-gallon bottles at a brisk clip, because they’re a necessary evil.

Now we’re only talking drinking water. For bathing and such this stuff is safe. You just crack off a hard shell every now and then. That’s really what snakes shedding their skin is about – it’s sloughing off the accumulated hard water deposits around here.

To be fair, I’m kind of a water snob. When I was a kid growing up in northeastern Iowa, we had our own well. We lived a few blocks from the Cedar River, a tributary of the Mississippi. I thought everyone could get water from the faucet that was cold without ice, and that tasted like – well, water. I thought there was something seriously wrong with the water at my grandma’s house in the next town. She had city water rather than her own well, but I didn’t know that until I was 8-ish or thereabouts. Her water tasted funny, and it wasn’t super cold, but it was drinkable.

Fast forward to 2016 and I’ve become a connoisseur of fine H2O. I know, for example, that Aquafina is the best bottled stuff you can get from the drug store. I know that whenever we go traipsing across town we take along something liquid and cold year-round, because carrying water is what you do. There are no public drinking fountains in the vicinity, and even if there were, you wouldn’t want to drink from them unless they were attached to one big ol’ honking filtration system.

Hubby promised to get a picture of the new sink today. I live such an exciting life. (Read that in the deadpan voice in which it was written.) He’s painting whilst I do laundry and dishes. I finally gave up and bought curtain rods from the Big Box Devil, because I refuse to pay $30 for a single curtain rod. Yeah, I know I’m cheap, and I don’t care who else knows it. We’re buying curtains online because we want something specific that will cost us an arm and a leg if we can even find it locally. It costs entirely too much for you to cover up your windows, but in this part of the world it’s also a necessary evil.

Once the painting is done, we’re going to tackle flooring. In theory we might even move in someday, but I’m not holding my breath.

This is the same series of pictures I posted on Facebook, give or take a few, so feel free to ignore them if you like.