The Important and the Mundane

In school, the boys learned that David Livingstone wrote in his journals about things that were super important and interesting, and he wrote about mundane, everyday life events, too. If D.L. can do it, so can I! :) Here is our mundane of late--

First off, the laundry room. I really don't like buying new washers and dryers every five years. This is the third set we've had in this house since we moved here less than a decade ago. They've been repaired, but still sounded like this . . .

We bought replacements, expecting the worst at any time, with money we'd set aside last fall. That pair sat in our garage until graduation month was complete. More on that to come. In the meantime, G$ has spent hours at our neighbor's trying to get the minibike fixed. It still is not. It needs pins and Idk what all, but it isn't safe to ride. Sad.

 

I decided to heat up some water for chai the other morning, and when I opened the microwave door, the top panel fell off, knocking my mug with a splash, and landing in a way that it not only turned on the stove burners below, but also landed on top of the flame. Gasp! It turns out this microwave was installed around the time I graduated college . . . and supposedly, we should have replaced it 3x since then given the normal lifespan of a microwave. Why can't the washer and dryer hit those 20-year marks?! Or the dishwasher? Anyway, the microwave seems to match the wall oven (which we've had soldered since we've moved in to get it working after a failed "self-clean" attempt), so did we replace it? No! Buck gorilla glued the top part back on, so no more fires!! At least from the microwave parts turning on the stove :) Maybe we'll budget replacements for next year, lol.

In other news, the boys' room was . . . indescribable. It needed some major fixies. "We" now "know" not to throw snack wrappers and sucker sticks behind our beds where the dust bunnies are the size of small cows. It took six hours of work, including me working solo when the boys left to go to actual work. I think we tossed four bags of trash, rehomed one trash bag of clothing, and moved two bags up to the shed for winter storage? It was a lot of bags.

Note to self and everyone else . . . it is not possible to refill a bean bag chair by yourself. Static electricity says, "No. White foamy things MUST go everywhere. They must."

So back to the laundry room. Remember way back to when we let the truck be trucky and we bought some new flooring, too? Well, the time came to empty the laundry room, ask around if anyone wanted our cute blue washer dryer (the scrapper man said, "You bet!"), and try to tear out the nasty, water-logged flooring. It looked like mold blooms below in bluish-black and brownish-yellow. But, it turns out big sections of the flooring was glued down and the glue changed colors. We decided to leave it, because it was really stuck in the areas where it hadn't peeled up from not being glued. It shredded, fractured into tiny shards when we tried to pull at it, so second layer it is! I've noticed on home renovation shows, that contractors love it when they find layers. I'm sure whoever redoes this after us will love it too, lol :)

Brennen pulled off the trim on the finished walls. He had to sit in the area where the toilet goes. We didn't know homeowners are supposed to replace their wax seals every five years or so to prevent leaking. We also thought this one was looking pretty bad . . . until we pulled the upstairs toilet. Yeah, we probably should have known about that replacing thing five or ten years ago . . . ay yi yi.

Once again, the classroom becomes storage space. We are mostly done with school; we counted the 27th as our official last day, but high school subjects linger on, so we're still working on finalizing for reals.

We raced the rain to try to cut our new flooring to some of the laundry room specs. The instructions recommended leaving three inches extra on all the sides. That might work on a square room without a furnace, water heater, misc. pipes, a closet bump out, etc. etc., but not on our mathematical puzzle of a room. We tried our best to get the floor to lay flat but it still has some waves. My pretty rug disguises them nicely :)

The laundry room looks so much better and cleaner. I'm liking going back to top load for the washer. I was tired of the goopy hair mess on the rubber insert that I had to pull clean laundry across. I was also tired of being down on my knees to do laundry all the time. Before, we went with front load because it was so hard to lean in when I was pregnant all the time. Now that time has passed, so I'm glad to be back to the top :)

We hoped the kids' bathroom would be a quick flooring swap. We both had our doubts. Awhile back, I was looking for something in the cupboards and sat on the toilet and felt that it shifted, leaning down towards the lower level of our house. Also, something has been dripping into the laundry room from above. I'm not sure if we fixed that, but we certainly found evidence that the wax seal had long ago turned in its retirement papers. There were sections of subfloor completely missing from around the PVC pipe. That's not good! So Buck cut out the worst of it; we couldn't replace the whole floor without tearing out the cupboards and the tub. And I think to get the tub out, we'd have to take out a wall. It is the tiniest bathroom! They must have built walls in around the tub after it was placed, originally.

Putting in a new subfloor patch was not an easy task. Especially since Buck didn't want to hit joists or electrical. Also, the old subfloor expanded with water exposure over the course of who knows how many years, so the patch is noticeable when stepped on . . . but again, nothing a soft and squishy rug can't fix :) Now, the bathroom also looks a lot nicer and cleaner. Brennen took a drill and soft brush to the tub, so it looks night and day better than it did! This wee room gets a lot of use from four residents in particular :)

The only other broken "stuff" stressor of the week I don't have pictures of, well I do, but not an interesting picture. We took the van in because it made a very bad sound when I had to hard break to avoid hitting someone head-on in MY lane while they passed a parked vehicle. We took it to get looked at, and it needed an alignment kit for a couple hundred bucks (because basically driving on-road is like driving off-road around here). My sister-in-law's brother was like, "Now which member of the fleet is this? Oh, not one we've seen yet. I'll add it to the list." The really long list. 

Then a few days later, we took it to a dealership because the door wasn't closing correctly and it is still supposed to be under warranty/recall. But I'd wiggled the latch around enough that it was "fixed" and they couldn't recreate the problem. Ugh. Buck got to take a hot shuttle ride and his first Uber to get all of that straightened out. At least it was free, since they didn't do anything (except give it a car wash, woot!) NEVERMIND! Saw the credit card . . . I guess it was a $50 car wash.

Here's to hoping that stuff doesn't break for a while! It's possible, right?! :)