When a homeowner realizes that there’s no good ignoring one of those maintenance jobs with the typical ‘yeah… that really needs doing… yup… sure does…’, then it’s already far later than anyone would recommend. Anything that happens during the complicated process of the job… let’s call it a ‘repair’, really… okay ‘salvage’… anything that happens during that process – including the appearance of an Evil Lava Man direct from the Earth’s core as part of the job – all of it could have been avoided if you had simply got to the project a week ago. This is the thought which keeps smashing into the back of your eye-balls over and over as you fight the urge to hit someone in a Home Supply Centre, drag a someone randomly from a passing vehicle and make them take over the work, or simply solve the whole problem and set fire to the house.

Let’s turn to the visual aids, shall we? Could someone get the lights so we can start the slide show? Ta…

PLEASE NOTE: this slide show represents all photos to date, beyond the date of this post

Because the captions on the photos don’t display, I’ll explain a few things you’re seeing. The tiles are coded so that they can go back on the wall in the same spots, as it’s possible – though unlikely – that some of them have been trimmed by varying amounts to fit the wall better. The seams have been sealed to varying degrees of success with packing tape for a few months, because I keep forgetting to get more Duct Tape® every time I go to the hardware store. The weird white stuff you keep seeing on the back of the tiles is the old mastic or mortar that the tiles were stuck on the wall with. The wall board to which they were adhered had absorbed moisture over time so the paper surface on the outside of the board then peeled away with the tile once the board’s core was no longer solid. The wall board might have been the right kind for a bathroom application, but obviously it’s no good anymore as the grey stuff was essentially mush and had to be chucked. It was made with asbestos, by the way; that’s the little hairs you can see on the edge-on shots of some of the tiles.

Yes, I said ‘asbestos’. No, handling only this amount isn’t going to kill anyone. Besides, the stuff is wet right now – which is why it is being replaced, after all – and asbestos-based material is only a problem when the fibres are air-borne, which requires the stuff to be dry as a bone. Again, obviously not our problem.

The puffy, yellow stuff behind the wall board is standard fibreglass insulation of the early-1970s, and has been removed from between the studs. For the past few days, the bathroom has been home to a constantly running space-heater – except for the time I caught my foot in the extension cord, pulled the plug out of the wall, then nearly fell through the entranceway’s window, slicing my head off, and scaring the bejeesus out of the cat – in an effort to remove as much moisture from the existing wood construction as possible before sealing it all up again, so it’s tighter than a chav on a August Bank Holiday Friday evening. The bathroom’s quite nice and warm, let me tell you, but the constant humming from the room is becoming tiresome. It’s a bit like having an old Kodak® Carousel™ projector being left on in there. It’s not annoying, but you do have an occasional urge to shout ‘enough already!’ at it once in a while. Which wouldn’t do any good, so you don’t bother.

Yesterday, I went to the local Home Supply Place© and spoke to a Customer Service Representative® and was pointed at some 1/2-inch HardiBackr™ 500 G2 which would be ideal for replacing the evil asbestos board. At 36”x60”, it’s a perfect fit for the hole; or will be when I remove one more tile and clean-up the edges of the remaining board. Huzzah!

I also got some PlastiSpan© 3”x2’x8’ Type 2 Styrofoam® insulation to replace the fibreglass stuff which was more like a sponge than insulation. According to my mental arithmetic, this is precisely the size of space that needs filling, were it in one long, solid blob. Hooray!

After spending some time in the parking lot making several attempts to discover a way to get both these items in the car, it was determined that the Styrofoam® was a bit too long and the board a bit too large in either direction to fit inside the vehicle, even after folding down the back seat to open-up the trunk into the main compartment. The closest I could get was to have the foam sticking more than 2 1/2 feet out of the trunk and angling the board into the back seat through the rear passenger door which would then have to be left open whilst driving. Deciding that no police officer might be convinced that “no, really; it’s all right; it’ll be fine”, I returned to the store’s interior and ordered both items delivered, for the sum of $60. A van rental from the store for 1 1/2 hours would have been $20, but that’s just the base rate; there’s also mileage, taxes, gasoline, insurance, and so on… so it seemed a dead even thing by that point. Had we got a day’s insurance on the pickup truck, it might have been less, but as the truck hadn’t been insured yesterday, it was a moot point.

Having already taken almost an hour to navigate a cart through the aisles of the place, the cart bearing a half-inch thick, fifty pound board (it’s essentially a very thin concrete sheet), plus an eight foot long, two foot wide, three inch thick, rectangular object weighing about three ounces, then trying to fit both into a car without breaking or dropping either of them (and it was a bit windy, so manœuvring the insulation was a challenge at one point), I was frankly ready to pay any amount of money to rid myself of the problem.

So…

Later today two men will be shaking their heads as they deliver two relatively easy to move objects to a tiny man who clearly has never done an honest day’s work in his life, for a fee 50% more than the value of the products themselves.

Then I get to learn about cutting Styrofoam® and how one affixes fifty pounds of half-inch material to the wall without dropping it on one’s foot in the bathtub and then losing one’s balance, falling over, and slicing one’s head off on something and frightening the cat.

A couple of weeks ago, I installed Windows 7 in my computer, and it’s working fine. If it weren’t, you probably would not be reading this as the inter-net would be inaccessible by me, and I would have slashed my wrists by now due to withdrawal. Until last night, Jennifer’s computer wouldn’t connect to my printer, however, and her word processor seemed to be crapping out, when Windows XP wasn’t freezing up for no reason at all. Both of her problems have seemingly been resolved, however. Time will tell.

Right. So, that’s what is happening in our home at the moment. Offers of travel to somewhere warm – which must be both inexpensive and perfectly tiled – are welcomed. I know you’re out there, because the hits can’t all be caused by Russian SPAMers wanting to talk about grand pianos.

Or can they…? Maybe they could help with the re-tiling?