The pump don’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handle*

Well, I’m not exactly suffering the subterranean homesick blues, but I am experiencing the subterraneous reno drive me crazies.

The day began with a visit to the scene of the renovation, for what I thought was going to be a fairly straightforward meeting with the electrician. While that went better than I had anticipated, there were still a couple of potential gotchas, and an unexpected trip back to the lighting place this morning. (They don’t open early enough for my GC to take care of the grab-and-go we need.) Then there’s the extra up-to-code stuff in the new fuse box I’ll need if I want – which I do – to replace the old ivory colored sockets and switch plates in the bedroom and den with more up-to-date white ones.

Then the plumbers informed me that the pressure valve for one of the bathrooms needed to have an integral diverter. Oh, that. While I had explained to the person at the plumbing place exactly what I needed, given that I was going with both a shower head and separate spray “thing”, they set me up with the wrong pressure valve. I may have solved my own problem: just use the spry thing-y as the shower fixture. But we’ll figure it out.

A bit more problematic is the vanity for the downstairs bathroom. The good news is, it’s in! The bad news, well, now that they opened up the walls, they’ve found that they need to do some finessing to bring things up to code – which I’m learning is the magic word here. Which means that the 30” vanity, will have to shrink down to a 24” vanity. Not exactly what I wanted in a space where there’s no storage to begin with, and no place else to put the storage. Sigh!

The worse sigh is that there’s 30% fee to take back the wonderful vanity I wanted. But the good news is that, since the incredible shrinking vanity will be cheaper, I might even break even on the transaction.

It’s not as if my head weren’t exploding enough, but I called to reschedule when the cable guy is coming so that we can try to figure out how to get the cable to where the new cable lines need to go, and was told that the meeting – which “Joe” at Comcast had supposedly set up for me – was never set up to begin with.

This is actually good news, as I was rescheduling it because, as it turned out, the electrician couldn’t be there on the day I thought Comcast was coming. We’ll see if they show up today.

Perhaps they can explain why the cable runs through the bathroom to begin with…(I have no recall about when we got cable put in. We’ve been at our place for nearly 25 years, but, whenever it was installed, it was my husband’s bailiwick. Now all the bailiwicks are mine. Where’s Diggy when I need him?)

Meanwhile, all the work-work I thought I was going to get done today – including a “real” episode of Pink Slip – went by the boards.

Anyway, I’m learning all sorts of new stuff, but it’s nothing that I have any interest in learning. And, trust me, it’s nothing that I’ll ever use again in my life.

Onward!

 

*Those of a certain age and/or inclination will recognize this line from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues.