It's Always Something

It's our new family motto

So we've pushed back our Open House date.  Again.  This time our reason was that because all the rest of the house was all fresh and new-painty, it made the basement look like crap.  So we're repainting the basement too, just because we don't have enough to do.  Actually, Mr. Pickles got most of the basement done just today, with help from an awesome teenaged member of the same awesome family who helped us finish our bedroom last weekend. 

see?  doesn't it look better already?  (actually, I took this picture as further evidence of the state my poor house is currently in.)  (that would be: "a wreck")

Mr. Pickles is a veritable painting machine, I tell you.  I have had to relinquish most of the painting to him, because a) SOMEONE has to feed the bottomless pits known as Our Children, several times a day even, and b) we have very, very different painting styles.  For the sake of marital harmony I am giving him (almost) complete freedom to follow whatever process seems most logical to him.  If there is a process.  I wouldn't know.

N-E-WAY, there's always something.  Whatever house-related task we undertake can never be simple.  When we first started Doing Stuff, the toilet tank in the front bath decided that Mr. Pickles wasn't busy enough and gave him 3 extra days of work trying to deal with totally rusted bolts.  (Why, WHY would one make a bolt for a toilet tank using non-rustproof metal?  WHY?)

Then after removing all the kitchen cabinet doors and TSP'ing the cabinets and priming them (twice) and painting them (twice), I realized I hated the color.  On the card it was a lovely, neutral straw-ish.  ("Ivoire" by Sherwin Williams.  Who comes up with these names???)  On the cabinets, it was yellow.  Like, hello! yellow.  It's a weird trick of the light in that room.  And after the new countertops were installed, it definitely did Not Go.  So, now what?

Oh, we gained a new Picklesbane: the banisters!  After dealing with the wood of the kitchen cabinets, we realized what a pain painting the banisters was going to be (2 flights of stairs plus rails plus supports plus 6 spindles on each side plus upstairs and dining room times TSP times primer squared times paint squared times polyurethane equals BIT FAT STINKING HEADACHE), and went through several days of mental anguish trying to decide what to do.  Meanwhile the TSP we were using to clean them was actually taking off the top layer of finish (in addition to the accumulated years' worth of greasy handprints which I had never been able really to clean off), so we had to do SOMEthing and couldn't just stick it to the new owners.

Most recently, after the new double sink was installed, Mr. Pickles was hooking up the plumbing all by hisself (despite the fact that he is haunted by a personal plumbing poltergeist the sole purpose of whose existence is to make any ostensibly simple plumbing job take at least 3 days and 4 trips to the hardware store to finish -- seriously, it's like a curse) and after attaching the faucet with cold water (only cold at first b/c the hot connection was giving him trouble, natch) and getting one drain attached (huzzah!), he realized that when the house was built, the drain pipe for the other sink was installed A FOOT TOO HIGH.  So the pipe was butting up against the bottom of the new sink.  And there was no room for the u-bend.  Who does these things?!?

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I am so, so, so thankful that none of the kids has had fevers, or the stomach flu, or fallen off their bike/scooter and gotten a concussion/broken bone/scrape-induced infection.  Because you know that's what's missing from our lives right now.

Oh, the baby did fall down the stairs today.  That probably counts.  And I thought I was getting mastitis earlier this week.

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You know, as much as all these issues made us want to pull out whatever hair we have left, we've been able to find solutions for them all.  Nothing has been insurmountable... so far.  (Quick!  Find wood! *knock knock knock*)

1) Mr. Pickles, through sheer force of will, fixed the toilet tank.  I don't even remember what he did, it was so many eons ago, before we'd given up hope of a social life.  I think it involved his hacksaw.

2) We're painting the kitchen cabinets white.  We just happen to have a gallon of Ultra Pure White semi-gloss which we are using on the trim.  We considered getting half a dozen samples of varying paint shades and trying them on a couple cabinet doors to find one which worked, and then I pondered the logistics of first choosing half a dozen paint samples that matched both the walls and the granite and then bringing my entourage (that would be the children) to the paint aisle of the hardware store and then painting the cabinet doors and then going BACK to the hardware store to purchase the color we'd chosen and then I think at this point my brain stalled and my attitude became something along the lines of "who the hell cares" and I decided to save myself a migraine and go with what's trending now anyway.  (Go ahead!  Search Pinterest!)  Plus if the new owners hate it, white is really easy to paint over!

3) For the banisters, a friend recommended Minwax, a water-based squeezy-tube wood stain-with-finish, thereby earning herself after her death an honored seat among the seraphim.  It squeezes out of a tube!  You rub it on with a rag!!  It looks fabulous!!!  And you don't even have to sand the life out of your banisters first!!!!  We will probably still need to put some kind of a protectant on top, since these rails get some serious use.  But they are going to look awesome!

4) So after Mr. Pickles realized that he had been overpowered by his plumbing poltergeist curse, he called the granite installers and told them of his difficulty, and they sent a plumber THAT DAY to fix it. (!!)  The plumber agreed that whoever installed the pipe that high was an idiot. (paraphrasing)  But, because he's a professional plumber, he has Tools and Supplies which are not available to mere mortals.  He had a u-bend that was deeper than standard issue at the local Home Despot, and was able to attach the drain.  Huzzah!  ...Until he realized there was a clog in the pipe.  It had never given us trouble before, but it was very obviously draining e x t r e m e l y  s l o w l y.  He ran a snake down and pulled it back with all this disgusting gunk on the end.  Sigh, it's always something.  But wait!  This story also has a happy ending -- because it is a double sink, that means it has double drains, and therefore double drain pipes, one of which is fully functional -- so he simply capped off the evil too-high-nastily-clogged pipe, and redirected the sink's drain so the two sinks share a drain pipe.

behold, the Frankendrain!

Let me tell you, that plumber's bill was worth every penny.

Oh, you want to see the actual SINK?  And the new granite countertops?

ta-da! Don't they look lov-- ...er...

Well, too bad, because within 2.5 minutes of them being installed, they were covered with Stuff.  And now they pretty much always look like this.  (This is what they look like after we clean up!)

I pinky-promise we will do a huge reveal of all the rooms, after I get all this guldurned junk outta the place so you can see the bright! shiny!  The photographer will hopefully be coming in not this Tuesday but the next, and the realtor will come over the day before with her "staging team" (sounds kind of ominous to me) to basically make the place look like 7 people don't live here.  I wish them luck.  At any rate I will take pictures before that, of all the things WE'VE done, just so we can have a record of how awesome our place could look if we're willing to forgo sleep for 2 months.

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Oh, and I don't have mastitis.  And I promised myself not to skip any more of baby's feedings just to fit one more essential errand in.  You know, every day something's gotta give -- either it's the laundry, or the housecleaning, or the homsechooling, or sleep or regular meals or personal hygiene... not everything can be done every day.  I just get to choose what's going to get neglected each day.  (Note to self: not baby.)  The plugged duct also could have been due to massive stress -- I think that was the day we realized that we were going to have to call a plumber plus our basement looked like crap and we were going to have to paint it.  So as soon as I felt flu-like symptoms I abandoned all semblances of being productive, took baby to bed and drank gallons of water.  And said a prayer of thanksgiving that my body can speak so clearly: "Stop moving for five minutes, you idiot, and take a break!"

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Sorry this post is a little more... dippy than usual -- I think I'm a little high from priming the cabinet doors in a semi-enclosed space.   Wheeeeeeeee!

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And because no post is complete without a totally unrelated picture of adorable baby: