busybee fluffy rambles

Bathroom

Plumbing was supposed to happen today but they somehow forgot to put me on the schedule. Which I found out when I’d called the plumber to find out when they were intending to start, and they had some more questions for me anyway, and it turns out they’d meant to send a new estimate based on what I’d figured out. Hopefully it’ll happen soon.

Fireplace

Fireplace work started today, but the fireplace folks still hadn’t gotten the liner purchased (and couldn’t get it because all the suppliers are still closed), so now I have a chimney with flashing and a crown but no cap, which means if it rains tonight there will be water inside, because for some reason the dude in his infinite wisdom didn’t even cover it with a tarp. Sigh. This particular fireplace contractor isn’t so great at the communicating.

But anyway the old chimney cap did come down and it’s incredibly rusted and shoddy and was very much falling apart so yeah, I’m glad this work got done when it did, before things got way, way worse.

3D printing

I was about to start a production run of the tamping stations, and my printer decided that this would be a perfect time for its bed leveling sensor to fail. So I switched back to my old Artillery Genius for now (oh god it is so slow and the bed is so small¹) and spent all day trying to troubleshoot the sensor. Apparently there’s a pretty common problem with the X1C where the sensor’s cable (a $4 part) tends to fail weirdly. In this case, I think that when it recalibrated because of the firmware update, a marginal connection got shaken loose.

Anyway, so I ordered a $4 cable which had $7 shipping on it, so I ended up ordering a bunch of filament, and then discovered that I apparently have a Bambu filament membership? I’m not sure when I ended up with that. Was it something Bambu gave me for being a Kickstarter backer? I’m not finding any records in my email of having subscribed or being given it. Well, in any case, it means that Bambu’s branded filament is currently cheaper than my usual supplier anyway. But gosh I have a lot of filament now.

In any case, I’m thinking of ramping up my production which means it’d actually be beneficial for me to build an actual print farm, and I’m considering getting a Bambu P1P or P1S to supplement my X1C. But if I do end up pivoting into ceramics I don’t think more printers would be useful, since there my limiting factor is how many plaster molds I have in service and how much stuff I can load up in the kiln up the street.

Oh, and I got my first Etsy sale today! I hope the buyer is happy with their new Timemore catch cup.

I’m feeling like maybe I should have become a plumber, as I’m getting pretty good at figuring out what’s going on behind my shower (in ways that the plumbers who actually came out to look at it and give estimates on seem to have missed). It looks like the problem is just with the connection between the shower head and the valve. It’s possible that with the right tools it’d be possible to just open up the wall a little bit to gain access to the valve side of the pipe to tighten (and maybe re-tape) it, and then the shower head end might only need the drywall to be opened up to have that connection tightened as well. I might not need any retiling at all! That would be ideal, at least.

Anyway this is stuff to go over with the plumber next week.

The plumber who did the “quick fix” and diagnosis on tuesday, incidentally, made a couple of things a lot worse, and I just ended up having to replace my tub spout as well (because he installed it with loc-tite on the faucet end for some reason, even knowing that this was meant to be a temporary fix). Oh well, the one I replaced it with is much nicer looking. The pipe leading to it is a little bit too long now, though. Do I need to cut it down and get a threading tool or something?

Got a second estimate from a plumber today. This one did a much more thorough diagnosis than the first one and he determined that there is definitely a leak between the valve and the tub spout, and pointed out some definite problems left by the contractors. This was a pretty thorough amount of work that took a few hours and cost a chunk of money, but that’ll make the estimation from the remaining plumber (who will be coming on Thursday) a lot more straightforward.

Today’s plumber estimates that the necessary plumbing work will be around $3000, plus however much it costs to redo the tiling. He said there’s tilers that his company works with which might work well although scheduling is difficult at present. And they’d be able to limit the amount of tiling work that needs to be redone, at least.

Anyway on Thursday I should have the final estimate for the plumbing stuff and then I can try working with the bathroom contractor in terms of who’s paying for all this. Or maybe he’d be able to prove the quality of his new crew by doing it for free but I’d have no reason to trust him to do a good job at this point.

Ugh.

This morning’s shower with the exposed drywall confirmed that there is definitely a leak, on the output side of the valve.

Some tile is going to have to be removed and reinstalled. I guess I need to start looking at bathroom contractors again.

There is a fucking leak in the wall behind my bathtub

It is probably yet another fucking hurrah from the shitty goddamn bathroom remodeler folks

It is going to be fucking expensive to fix

Maybe the plumbers will be able to get at the pipes from the side but I’m not optimistic about that

This leak has probably been there for a while but it’s taken this long to be apparent, because it was slowly eroding away the drywall next to the tub and causing the baseboards to swell up

I suspect I’m going to need to sue the contractor for gross negligence

At least I still have plenty of tile left over from the renovation, in case the worst comes to pass and I need to get that wall redone

anyway this guy fucking sucks

The plan went pretty much according to keikaku¹.

I had difficulty finding the studs because there’s some particleboard behind the drywall for some reason. Maybe some half-assed attempt at a moisture barrier or something? It was pretty obvious that it was there since it was visible through the light wiring hole. I ended up using some neodymium magnets to locate some drywall screws and then verified it by drilling pilot holes. I’m not absolutely certain that they’re screwed into studs but there’s a lot more support than there was before, and those screws are at least held tight to the wall.

On the left anchor I thought I’d messed up and that there actually was a stud behind it, somehow, and I started to patch it up so that I could screw in a construction screw instead (which is why there’s plaster on the left hole in the first picture), until I remembered, oh yeah, there’s weird backing board behind some of the drywall. So I drilled a smaller pilot hole and, yep, it went through easily, so yeah, it needed an anchor after all. (I mean I already knew that based on what had happened previously, but, still.)

Also I couldn’t find the nice toggle anchors I’d bought a couple years ago, so I ended up buying some similar ones at Home Depot. Which aren’t nearly as nice. A couple of them ended up breaking off and falling into the wall, and they were just kinda not-great to work with in general. But they did their job, and everything’s tightly screwed down.

Leveling the cabinet was a pain in the ass. It’d have been a lot easier if I had someone to help me but I was being stubborn about just getting this done.

Also, I didn’t need to do any painting, as all of the paint damage happened to be behind the cabinet. Nice.

Hopefully this time it stays up for more than two years!

Also I decided to be fancy and whipped up a custom centering jig to draw the centerline for drilling the holes in the hardwood. It was absolutely overkill but it didn’t take me long to do. I’ll probably post it as a customizable object on thingiverse/printables or something.