Well… this is a thing

Hi everyone.

So, only one photo this week. The downstairs is a mess, as you can see.

I’ll explain…

Last Friday you might recall that the drywall hanger was here and working hard. Turns out it took 10 hours on Saturday to finish that job. Then the finishing guy arrived on Monday morning to get going, and that has been a whole thing.

As I said, the place is a mess. Mud and dust all over the floors. It’s impressive. On top of that, we have four small electric heaters, one larger electric heater, a dehumidifier, and two fans running downstairs in some combination most of the time. It’s noisy. We turn off the big heater at night because it is so loud.

At the moment it looks like drywall finishing will be done on Wednesday or Thursday. That’s great, but it’s not the only thing going on.

Today we met with the tile guy and the flooring installer.

The meeting with the tile guy went well. We talked about the tile we have selected, figured out how to handle the niche in the wall, and what we’re doing about the pony wall between the shower and the rest of the bathroom. He had excellent suggestions, and it all sounds good.

Then we talked with the flooring guy. That was tougher. He’s never installed the particular flooring we have selected, and he’s clearly more comfortable with other products as a result. That’s fine. If we can get close to what we wanted in terms of colour, we’ll be happy. And he agreed that wood in the laundry room was the right answer, so we can simplify there.

But then I asked about a fancy glue that would act as a moisture barrier in addition to holding the wood flooring down. Sure thing, he says, if you need it. If your concrete is too wet, we’ll have to use that. “How wet is that?” I asked. He said he’d go get his moisture meter, and we’ll see how it goes.

And it turns out we’re too wet. All over the house. I’m not clear on the units involved, but it seems the concrete should be in the mid-teens as a percentage, and we’re in the upper teens or even low twenties. He can’t glue the floor down in that case.

The alternative is a floating floor. Rather than glue the floor down, they lay down heavy polyurethane sheeting as a vapour barrier, then add a layer of underlayment, and then the wood goes down on top of that. The joints are glued together, and the whole floor is “loose” rather than being glued down. This is fine — it can even be refinished — but there is one problem. The transition between the hallway and the tile floor in the bathroom needs a transition strip. The floating floor can move, and you can’t secure it to the tile with a grout joint, so you have to put a strip in to hide the transition and let the wood floor move.

And there are other complications as well. The flooring guy wants the cabinets installed first, rather than after the floating floor is down. But that wrecks the schedule everyone has been moving towards.

So, things are complicated.

Then we discovered that the tile we’ve picked out for the bathroom is nearly out of stock. There isn’t enough there to do the job, and the tile guy wants to get started on Tuesday! We’re heading off to the tile shop very shortly to see about a plan B on that front. There is more of the tile we wanted coming in, but it’s three weeks out. So we have to think through the alternatives and see what we can do.

And then the drywall finisher tells us his mother is in the hospital. That’s not impacting his schedule, but in my experience such things can change. We hope he finishes next week, but only time will tell.

So that’s been the week: constant white noise, a huge mess, a lack of tile, and concrete that is too wet to glue down the floor. Such fun!

Then there’s Tinkerbelle. She had an appointment on Monday afternoon, and the results were not what we wanted. Her hematocrit was down a bit, having fallen to just below the normal range. Now, she’s been much worse than this before, and she seems fine, but we don’t know if this is just her new normal with some fluctuation in the numbers or if they are actually falling again. We’re going to go another month on just the immunosuppressor and recheck. If she rises or stays stable, we’re OK. If she continues to fall, then we have to put her back on the steroid, let that kick in, then increase the dose of the cyclosporine, and then taper the steroid off. Apparently increasing the dose of an immunosuppressor doesn’t cause an increase in hematocrit all by itself.

So, fingers crossed that her numbers are back up next week. If so, we’re just seeing noise in her state, and life goes on. If not, we get to do the drug dose shuffle at least one more time.

On the fun side, We Rate Dogs listed their 10 worst dogs for April 1st. All dog lovers need to see this.

And that is the end of the post. I have to snarf down a lunch and go to the tile shop. There are probably more typos than usual in this post as a result. Sorry!

Cheers all!