Bathroom Project

I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!

One thing that I am especially thankful for is that the family will be gathering at our house for Christmas this year. My goal is to make the place so delightfully festive that Normal Rockwell pukes in his grave.

But, before I can get around to decking the bejezus out of the halls, I have a project to do. Mrs. Snowurchin wants the floor in the hall bathroom replaced so, since it is long overdue and I have not had a project in a while, I am pretty amped.

The idea is to take up the original linoleum and put down stone tiles. Obviously, this is the perfect opportunity to repaint the room, recondition the baseboards, add decorative trim top and bottom, install a new shower head, replace doorknobs and hinges, reseal the sink, install higher quality towel racks, and install some stone wall tiles in a bare area above the bathtub.

I honestly wonder how much of that other stuff will actually get done before Christmas...

The important thing is to get the floor finished as quickly as possible, though, so that my wife can have her bathroom back and my 2-year-old can go back to “bathtime” instead of “quickly hosing off in the shower time”.

It is 9:07 AM Friday. The wife, our son, and her dad are out at Wal-Mart doing the Black Friday thing and I am most certainly not (Hey – yet another thing to be thankful for!). While they are out fighting the crowds and trying to see how many linear miles of rainbow-colored duct tape they can buy for fifty cents, I am coming up with a list of things I am going to need to make the new floor happen. This is definitely one of those situation where we are both thinking “Sucker!”.

After we leave here and arrive back home I will take some measurements and also take an inventory of the tools and materials I have on-hand. Tonight we will go to Lowe's and buy all the stuff I need for Phase 1 (new floor, minimal life disruption) of this project. Jimmydunes is scheduled to come over tomorrow morning to help me move the toilet and to teach me the ins and outs of that sort of plumbing – something he has done but I have not.

I just hope the linoleum is easy to tear up, but I have a strong suspicion it will not be. Here is my reasoning. It's long and rambly, but I do get to the point eventually - just hear me out.

See, I have a belief – call it a delusional superstition if you want – that most events that happen in our day-to-day lives that are ever so slightly outside of the norm are not happenstance, but occur for a reason. Bits of slight fortune somewhat balance the bits of slight misfortune that happen, and vice-versa.

An unexpected $500 bonus in your paycheck somewhat offsets the unexpected $600 tax bill you get in the mail a week later. The power supply in your work computer fails causing you to lose the last 15 minutes of your presentation hours before a gaping network security flaw exposes your entire organization to a vicious hacker attack. I am sure you have noticed stuff like that in your own life.

So what is this supposed “reason” that I am talking about? It is nothing magical or mystical. It has nothing to do with angels or demons. It just has to do with balance. Oh, and not “balance” in a creepy sissified Zen way, either. I am talking straight-up, purely mathematical balance.

Look at it this way. What I see as a normal day might be seen by others as a rainbow-and-unicorns filled existence straight out of an old Disney flick. Other extremely fortunate people might see my day-to-day comings and goings as something sadly comical and possibly even worthy of pity. Everyone has their own personal yardstick as to what is “normal” that evolves as the major events of their life change who they were yesterday into who they are today.

Obviously, little things happen just to the plus and just to the minus of your baseline all the time, regardless of where that line relates to anyone else's. People are nearly infinitely adaptable. Heaping fortune or misfortune upon someone causes what they see as “normal” to shift until a new personal baseline is reached, with little ups and downs jittering around that new level.

Just to be clear: I am not talking about huge life events. I am talking about things that are barely out of the mundane - stuff like finding a wheat penny in your change, not the birth of a child or being involved in a near-fatal car wreck. Not stuff that is “all part of God's grand plan” or whatever – after all, no respectable deity is going to give a damn about whether or not you left your umbrella at the office as it starts to rain. I am just talking about the little things, and I am just talking about one way to appreciate the statistics behind them.

My belief is that, by acknowledging this “law of averages”, you can see the little pluses and minuses in a new light. Using retrospect, totally and genuinely unrelated events can be forced to fit together in a “why-because” framework in a very satisfying and sometimes fun way. Why did my shoelace break? So I could run into an old friend at Wal-Mart when I went to pick up a new set. Why did I find $20 a couple of weeks ago? To help pay for the speeding ticket I got today. Why did I drop that lightbulb in the kitchen? So, while sweeping up the shattered glass, I could find the wedding band I lost last year.

Thinking about things in this way helps make visible the gossamer thread that connects the billions of infinitesimal events in everyone's lives, and it lets me enjoy the small pluses in my own that much more.

What does this have to do with the bathroom floor? Well, a while ago the installation guys accidentally left a medium-sized crowbar in the back of a closet after they finished with the downstairs flooring renovation. They may have used it to tear up the old linoleum in the kitchen.

So “why” did they leave the crowbar behind? So I could have an easier time pulling up the extremely difficult old flooring in the bathroom six months later!

Of course, sometimes a crowbar is just a crowbar... :)

I will post with updates when I can.