Plumbing fluffy rambles

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?

Fire place, fire sale fluffy rambles

The fireplace work didn’t start today due to the rain. They originally rescheduled it for tomorrow but then the person scheduled for tomorrow got sick, so it’ll be Monday at the earliest. … And I just realized that means they scheduled it for Christmas, which seems weird. I’m guessing they’re going to start on Tuesday instead. Which is the same day the plumbers were planning to start on my bathroom. Oy.

Anyway, my big blue couch is finally gone, and so is my resin printer. Now I just need to do some more decluttering of my living room (and find a home for the crap that I was keeping on the surviving couch), and also figure out where the heck I’m going to keep my folding treadmill because it’s a little too tall to go under the red couch. I suppose I could prop it up by a couple inches with some riser feet or something but that feels iffy to me.

I had briefly thought I was going to maybe set up a gym space downstairs (for the treadmill and my DDR setup) but there just isn’t room for it down there either. The treadmill hasn’t really been all that enjoyable to use anyway, though, so maybe I’ll just sell it in January when everyone’s suddenly interested in getting exercise. For now it’s stashed awkwardly behind my couch, and preventing me from setting up my cozy fireplace area the way I want to.

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Another home project: fireplace fluffy rambles

Another thing I’d been putting off way too long on this house was getting my fireplace evaluated, with a bunch of stuff that had been called out on the home inspection report.

Today I finally had a chimney inspector come out and he said that it’s in mostly good shape, but that the chimney cap would need to be replaced with a more modern crown, the flashing needs to be replaced, and of course the whole thing needs to be swept out. The estimate for all that came to be not a huge amount of money so I went ahead and scheduled that work too.

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Another bathroom update fluffy rambles

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.

Bathroom update fluffy rambles

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.

I do not need this right now fluffy rambles

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

What, another grinder?! Timemore Sculptor 064s Coffee Talk

As much as I appreciated my Sette 270, there were a few things I didn’t like about it:

  • The fine adjustment mechanism is weird and unpredictable (due to the dual-ring thing)
  • It is incredibly loud
  • Grinding for espresso usually took 3-4 cycles due to popcorning
  • The dang felt pretty huge (relative to my tiny kitchen)
  • It’s built for keeping stuff in the hopper rather than single-dosing

I was considering a number of other grinders (most notably the Option-O Lagom Mini) but then in April, Timemore announced the Timemore Sculptor series, in a number of sizes and grind profiles. And the requisite Kickstarter had it on a pretty deep discount.

So anyway, I backed the 064s (64mm stepless variant) and expected to wait.

And wait I did! But the lovely new grinder arrived today.

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