Weekend projects
Jul. 1st, 2024 08:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickBusy weekend doing projects.
Friday my cousin Heather called for a conversation that started off kinda You own a tile saw, right? and ended up like this:
She's redoing her bathroom and took out the old tub (4.5' tub, the small mobile home size because hers is a manufactured home) to put in a shower pan because they don't need, want, or use a tub. The shower pan arrived and the remodel workers were installing it on Friday when they said, "You know you're going to have to tile the floor on this before you can use it, right?"
No. No, she did not know that, right.
So Friday morning early I get a call from cousin who is a bit frantic (more than usual) and is like, "I need some tile installed, help me Obi Wan Kenobi, You're My Only Hope" style of thing, which OK, I get that. I said, "I can do that, my weekend's pretty open. You have the tile, right?"
No. She did not have the tile, right.
She was planning to go to Lowe's and just magically get the tile which they obviously would have in stock in all colors and sizes for any sort of tile need that one might have. (This is not how tile works. Tile must be ordered, well in advance of need. Tile is not a spur of the moment purchase. Nobody just decides on a whim to install some tile. Tile is not an impulse buy.) "Let me just pop in on my way to work and we'll get some measurements for how much tile this will take and then I'll see what I can do."
I love tromping past remodel workers who are judging me for not looking like a remodel worker when I am clearly the person roped in to solve the tile problem. It's my favorite.
Judge away, my pretties!
We needed about 16 square feet of tile, plus scrappage of at least 10% because I'm bad at this. I settled on 18 square feet of tile and headed over to my flooring people's warehouse. As it was still pretty early, the warehouse guy was on site. I explained my tile emergency to the warehouse guy (whose name I should know since he's been working there for more than ten years and I still just think of him as the warehouse guy which is me failing at humaning yet again) and asked if they had 18 square feet, give or take, of any neutral-ish 2x2 tile for a shower floor.
Warehouse guy was, "Probably. Let's go check out the leftover stuff in the basement." (This was not a ploy luring me into an unmarked white van. The basement is where the remaindered and scrap tile bits go, the stuff left over after proper jobs. It's perfectly safe. And, not that it matters, the flooring people's vans, while windowless and white, are also clearly emblazoned with the name of their company in letters a foot high. So, 100% safe.)
In the depths of the basement, we located (fairly quickly -- the leftover tile is sorted by size) 2x2 square tiles that would suit, in an appropriate amount which were all the same color. I was like "Those look fine."
He was, "Do you want to look at other colors?"
"Nope, this will work great. What do I owe you?"
"You guys buy a lot of flooring from us and this is not even enough tile for a minimal bath floor. We don't have much use for it and we'd like it out of the warehouse. For you? It's free."
I called my cousin and texted her a picture of the tile with the note "This color is called free."
Cousin: "That's my favorite color!" (Cousin pinches pennies until they squeal.)
I rounded up some grout and tile cement and proceeded to tile the area on Saturday morning, grouted it that evening, et voila! A job done competently and ready for the remodel workers to judge on Monday morning. Yay!
I was particularly happy that all the lines lined up, around the lip of the thing and so forth.
So that was Saturday. On Sunday, I addressed the pig problem in the chicken coop. There are two (small, right now) pigs in the lower part of the chicken coop which is actually a space designed for pigs and the problem isn't the pigs so much as the fact that pigs need water.
When they are wee tiny pigs (like they were three weeks ago), this isn't a big deal, but as they grow they need more water. The pigs are not huge at the moment but they are visibly bigger than they were three weeks ago and it's hot out and their water needs are increasing rapidly. Pigs need ample fresh water to grow efficiently and make the best use of the feed they are given.
The primary pig caregiver is in her seventies. She cannot schlep water to the pigs but must nag a grandchild (20-something males with on-again, off-again chemical dependency problems) into schlepping water to the pigs. This is, as you might expect, a somewhat unreliable water service that involves CARRYING SLOSHING WATER IN BUCKETS like we're in the fucking middle ages (albeit a middle ages with plastic five gallon buckets). Now, I'm not the one carrying the sloshing water in buckets, but this is still a decidedly offensive approach to pig watering given that we're living in the 2020's and not the 1420's. For fuck's sake, there's a perfectly good frost-free hose hookup right outside the chicken coop and pex pipe is about twenty-five cents a foot.
Long story less-long, there is now a plumbed-in pig watering nipple installed in the pig living space that is firmly attached (pigs are strong, busy, and destructive) and provides on-demand fresh water to the pigs without any buckets being involved at all. I only got stung once during the installation. (Wasps inhabit the upper reaches of the chicken coop along the rafters where we attached the pex pipe while running the line from the frost-free to the pig living space. Normally they mind their business and we mind ours, but we were mucking about in their space and they were a bit preturbed about that.)
The system is plumbed in half inch pex, can be disassembled and blown out for the winter (the pigs will only be in the chicken coop until October so this does not need to be a winter-capable system). Dear sweet summer child who is now asking But where will the pigs go for the winter?: We will be butchering and eating the pigs come the fall. There does not need to be water for them in the winter because they will be dead and in peoples' freezers by winter.
Anyway, so there was some question of whether or not the pigs (Spot and Chicken are the pigs. Spot has spots. Chicken is more afraid of things. We are OK with eating named food. If you are not OK with eating named food, maybe meat is not for you. Anyway, even though they are food, the pigs should get reasonable care and decent lives until they are food. There is no call to be abusive or mean to the pigs before they are food.) would be able to figure out how to work the automatic pig watering nipple. They had it sorted out in about five minutes post-installation. Pigs are pretty clever. Spot (bolder, more inquisitive, the explorer of the pair) worked it out first, Chicken took a little longer (due to being more flighty, reactive, and... chicken). There is video.
So yay. Success on solving the pig problem.
Friday my cousin Heather called for a conversation that started off kinda You own a tile saw, right? and ended up like this:
She's redoing her bathroom and took out the old tub (4.5' tub, the small mobile home size because hers is a manufactured home) to put in a shower pan because they don't need, want, or use a tub. The shower pan arrived and the remodel workers were installing it on Friday when they said, "You know you're going to have to tile the floor on this before you can use it, right?"
No. No, she did not know that, right.
So Friday morning early I get a call from cousin who is a bit frantic (more than usual) and is like, "I need some tile installed, help me Obi Wan Kenobi, You're My Only Hope" style of thing, which OK, I get that. I said, "I can do that, my weekend's pretty open. You have the tile, right?"
No. She did not have the tile, right.
She was planning to go to Lowe's and just magically get the tile which they obviously would have in stock in all colors and sizes for any sort of tile need that one might have. (This is not how tile works. Tile must be ordered, well in advance of need. Tile is not a spur of the moment purchase. Nobody just decides on a whim to install some tile. Tile is not an impulse buy.) "Let me just pop in on my way to work and we'll get some measurements for how much tile this will take and then I'll see what I can do."
I love tromping past remodel workers who are judging me for not looking like a remodel worker when I am clearly the person roped in to solve the tile problem. It's my favorite.
Judge away, my pretties!
We needed about 16 square feet of tile, plus scrappage of at least 10% because I'm bad at this. I settled on 18 square feet of tile and headed over to my flooring people's warehouse. As it was still pretty early, the warehouse guy was on site. I explained my tile emergency to the warehouse guy (whose name I should know since he's been working there for more than ten years and I still just think of him as the warehouse guy which is me failing at humaning yet again) and asked if they had 18 square feet, give or take, of any neutral-ish 2x2 tile for a shower floor.
Warehouse guy was, "Probably. Let's go check out the leftover stuff in the basement." (This was not a ploy luring me into an unmarked white van. The basement is where the remaindered and scrap tile bits go, the stuff left over after proper jobs. It's perfectly safe. And, not that it matters, the flooring people's vans, while windowless and white, are also clearly emblazoned with the name of their company in letters a foot high. So, 100% safe.)
In the depths of the basement, we located (fairly quickly -- the leftover tile is sorted by size) 2x2 square tiles that would suit, in an appropriate amount which were all the same color. I was like "Those look fine."
He was, "Do you want to look at other colors?"
"Nope, this will work great. What do I owe you?"
"You guys buy a lot of flooring from us and this is not even enough tile for a minimal bath floor. We don't have much use for it and we'd like it out of the warehouse. For you? It's free."
I called my cousin and texted her a picture of the tile with the note "This color is called free."
Cousin: "That's my favorite color!" (Cousin pinches pennies until they squeal.)
I rounded up some grout and tile cement and proceeded to tile the area on Saturday morning, grouted it that evening, et voila! A job done competently and ready for the remodel workers to judge on Monday morning. Yay!
I was particularly happy that all the lines lined up, around the lip of the thing and so forth.
So that was Saturday. On Sunday, I addressed the pig problem in the chicken coop. There are two (small, right now) pigs in the lower part of the chicken coop which is actually a space designed for pigs and the problem isn't the pigs so much as the fact that pigs need water.
When they are wee tiny pigs (like they were three weeks ago), this isn't a big deal, but as they grow they need more water. The pigs are not huge at the moment but they are visibly bigger than they were three weeks ago and it's hot out and their water needs are increasing rapidly. Pigs need ample fresh water to grow efficiently and make the best use of the feed they are given.
The primary pig caregiver is in her seventies. She cannot schlep water to the pigs but must nag a grandchild (20-something males with on-again, off-again chemical dependency problems) into schlepping water to the pigs. This is, as you might expect, a somewhat unreliable water service that involves CARRYING SLOSHING WATER IN BUCKETS like we're in the fucking middle ages (albeit a middle ages with plastic five gallon buckets). Now, I'm not the one carrying the sloshing water in buckets, but this is still a decidedly offensive approach to pig watering given that we're living in the 2020's and not the 1420's. For fuck's sake, there's a perfectly good frost-free hose hookup right outside the chicken coop and pex pipe is about twenty-five cents a foot.
Long story less-long, there is now a plumbed-in pig watering nipple installed in the pig living space that is firmly attached (pigs are strong, busy, and destructive) and provides on-demand fresh water to the pigs without any buckets being involved at all. I only got stung once during the installation. (Wasps inhabit the upper reaches of the chicken coop along the rafters where we attached the pex pipe while running the line from the frost-free to the pig living space. Normally they mind their business and we mind ours, but we were mucking about in their space and they were a bit preturbed about that.)
The system is plumbed in half inch pex, can be disassembled and blown out for the winter (the pigs will only be in the chicken coop until October so this does not need to be a winter-capable system). Dear sweet summer child who is now asking But where will the pigs go for the winter?: We will be butchering and eating the pigs come the fall. There does not need to be water for them in the winter because they will be dead and in peoples' freezers by winter.
Anyway, so there was some question of whether or not the pigs (Spot and Chicken are the pigs. Spot has spots. Chicken is more afraid of things. We are OK with eating named food. If you are not OK with eating named food, maybe meat is not for you. Anyway, even though they are food, the pigs should get reasonable care and decent lives until they are food. There is no call to be abusive or mean to the pigs before they are food.) would be able to figure out how to work the automatic pig watering nipple. They had it sorted out in about five minutes post-installation. Pigs are pretty clever. Spot (bolder, more inquisitive, the explorer of the pair) worked it out first, Chicken took a little longer (due to being more flighty, reactive, and... chicken). There is video.
So yay. Success on solving the pig problem.
