Everyday Stupidities

Greetings, true believers. My weekend went pretty okay, what with Amanda Jayne keeping us in stitches and sundry projects around the house to attend to. Things didn't go exactly as planned/hoped, so to go over last entry's itinery:

* Molding: Mostly removed -- it comes off the wall a lot easier than the bottom of the vanity, where the crackheads used some serious glue. This is going to require a chisel and gunk remover.
* Trim: Haven't done that yet because I pulled up one and found out just how much of a gap there is between the wall edge and the doorframe. It'll only take a minute to rip it all off, but I'm gonna wait so there isn't a week of gapping-ugly.
* Backsplash: I was forbidden from removing that because we still use the sink.
* Medicine cabinet: Okay, another freaking minute. Didn't get around to it, basically.
* Vanity cleaning: This got accomplished.
* Caulk: I was forbidden from removing that because we still use the tub.
* Sanding: Didn't do that because half the stuff that needed sanding wasn't exposed. Possibly I can do this during the week if those items come down.
* Painting: No.
* Neice-labor: There was some but we didn't exploit her to the fullest extent. I know, what a waste! But we weren't exactly on the ball.

One stupidity we invoked upon ourselves:
we apparently had forgotten the dimensions of our vanity; we bought three large bins for the inside, and they are just won't work. On the plus side, they only charged us for one bin. On the minus side, that means we can only be refunded for one bin. We keep encountering a related bit of stupidity, regarding our vanity and our kitchen cupboards -- the shelving products available in the stores do not match the space available, there's always one side that's too wide. Like a couple weeks ago when I was trying to find something for the cabinet the range hood is in (three feet tall but ten inches deep); everything at the hardware warehouses was too wide, and there was one shelf at Bed Bath & Beyond that would have been great but the drawer rails were perpendicular to the direction they need to be going. Do I have to build everything?!

And speaking of doing my Bill Ding imitation, one item that wasn't on the bathroom project list but was on our larger home improvement list did get done over the weekend. Last night, I replaced the two hanging spotlights facing the mantle with two little recessed lights. This was an adventure, since the old lights were put in by drilling one hole and putting the wires through it (and once again, the fixtures were being held in place by paint because the screws didn't go into anything) and the new lights required cutting holes in the ceiling and rolling around in the fluffy white fiberglass batting to work with the wiring. It's lucky we found some hydrocortisone lotion in the vanity cleaning extravaganza, I needed it pretty bad and still itch a little now. I did commit one boo-boo, I cut the hole for one of the lights before finding out where the stud was (I just followed the hole the wires came through), then had to move it forward three inches, so now there's a crescent of ceiling I need to patch with something more filling than spackle. But they do work, and once we get some spotlight bulbs in there (the globed fluorescents from IKEA that I like so much stick out and the whole idea here was to not have light shining on the television) it'll be pretty cool. If I haven't said it in the last half hour, let me remind you: the previous residents were tweakers, and the wiring upstairs was incredible. At least this time they used utility boxes and insulated grounded wire rather than speaker wire to hook stuff up. (And I did yank out a length of speaker and appliance cord which was connected to flat two-wire antenna... and neither end was connected to anything else!)