… and the Master Bath

The lines are straight. It's the camera lens that's curved.

Day eleven and the walk-in closet is pretty much done. Instead of wooden baseboards, porcelain bullnose adds a touch of class — even if most of our work will be hidden by the clutter of plastic drawers, hanging clothes, boxes and shoes.

We have it for a month. 

We decided to skip the weekly garbage pick-up and go all out with the smallest dumpster we could get. Fifteen cubic yards. We won't get near filling it up, but the collection of demolition debris in the bathroom was really too much.

Showers are wet, yet the only accommodation in
the previous remodel was thin plastic sheeting
(like the plastics bags for your vegetables, only
a bit thicker) stapled to the studs behind the basic
(i.e., not even waterproof) sheet-rock.
Of course, the sheet-rock screws in
the bottom foot or two were all rusted.

Actually, the bathroom is too much. Specifically, roughing in a walk-in shower is too much for me. This is the first time I've demolished down to the studs. Tearing out the old wall tiles revealed funky construction, multiple layers of wallboard, crumbly mortar, huge strips and gobs of still flexible caulk, insulation coated with black mold, and insect feces. The shower floor tiles came out attached to huge pieces of poorly set concrete. The shower floor is a mess. On the plus side, the studs are in good shape — no rot.

Rotary hammer, much preferable to a
sledge hammer and chisel, but
the vibration and dust are terrible!

Eleven days and I've hit a bit of a wall. I don't want to be responsible for installing the shower pan, a new square drain and the floor grading so the water goes down the drain, glued plastic liner material. I'll pay someone to install the floor and walls so all I have to do is cut and cement tiles.

We had a guy come out today to get us a quote on the shower.

Imagine the floor crumbles to the touch.

Preparing the bathroom floor itself was enough of a job. Now I know what is a “rotary hammer.” It’s an electric jack-hammer. It probably has other uses, like making bread dough and polishing cars, but it's good for tearing up old tile and the mortar that holds it down, the thin-set.

A rotary hammer looks innocent enough, but it packs quite a wallop and generates veritable haboobs of mortar dust. Wretched stuff. We should keep a canary in that room and watch for it coughing and passing out.

My hands are vibrating like they have Parkinson’s. The alternative is Michaelangelo-ing it with a sledge hammer and chisel — which I did for three hours on Sunday with little result except for the pain in my hands and arms.

Friends who are also doing some remodeling took pity and lent us their rotary hammer. They are good friends!

I could not conceive how this thing could cut
safely without breaking your hand, but
it does, and quite elegantly.

I am the proud owner of an “oscillating tool” which has an ugly looking cutting edge that makes flush cuts. I got talked into buying one at Home Depot and it's one purchase I haven't regretted.

Eleven days into it and Shari has already declared this to be our last construction project. My idea of "remodel" is increasingly becoming (a) assembling Ikea furniture and (b) replacing light switch covers with decorative Mexican ones. I want to work in the garden and dream about making tongue-in-cheek YouTube videos on Do-It-Yourself projects.

Tile Floors

I propose that tiling be made the official sport of the Old Pueblo. Enough of marathons and Tour de Tucson. The competition ought to be gutting existing flooring, chiseling old thinset, stuffing garbage cans with construction debris, layout design, floor and tile buttering and, of course, grouting. As I often say, the family that grouts together stays together.

Carpet is frowned upon in the Old Pueblo. Stores and generates dust. Cheap carpeting and cheap foam padding disintegrate into crumble dust. You know it's there, but when you pull it up, you gag at what you have been living with.

Tile floors are the way to go. Preferably nice, hard, durable porcelain tiles.

We have been wanting to tile the bedrooms ever since we bought this house eight years ago. We inherited a sort of a white subway tile in the kitchen, bathrooms, and dining room, and everywhere else the same cheap, off-white carpeting. What's cheap? The abrasive feel of wall-to-wall carpet made from petroleum.

Most of the subway tile we replaced in the great kitchen cum guest bath remodel of 2007. That was our first stay in our new house. We had the old kitchen for a week before it was gutted. We got to use the new one for only a week before we migrated north for spring. In between, we camped among boxes, cooked on a plug-in burner, and ate out a lot as professionals gutted and installed with ruthless efficiency. Still, the schedule spread over two and a half months.

This time it's easier because we are working at our own pace. We can move the bed to one corner while we work on the rest of the floor.

We are seven days into this project. Eight hundred square feet of master bedroom, adjacent bedroom (currently stuffed with furniture, as is the hallway — dangerous to walk through in the dark), walk-in closet, and master bath. Maybe we will have most of it done in a couple of months.

Shari is nagging me to watch a YouTube video about installing tiles for a shower. My mind can't deal with it yet. I am still working on chiseling subway tile and scraping old thinset, wondering if I remember how to replace a toilet, and worrying about what we will find after stripping the shower walls to the studs.

Time is measured by the weekly garbage pickup. It will take many weeks to get rid of all the construction debris. Good thing our garbage cans have wheels. The old carpet doesn't weigh that much; it just takes up a lot of space. Old tile weighs a lot. We probably should have ordered a dumpster.

To give an idea of how long we have been planning this, eight years ago when we first drove from Whidbey to Tucson to take possession of our house, we pulled a trailer bearing three power-flush toilets. Two were installed in the great remodel of 2007. The third has been sitting in the garage, then storage unit, then shed — patiently waiting. The time has come.

Something's Happening Here …

Unusual garbage raises questions about what is going on.

… What it is ain't exactly clear.
There's a man with a knife over there
Telling me there's work in the air.

Stacks of tiles also raise significant concerns.

Steps in the Gully

The three steps; plus a broken Oaxacan pot relocated from
the backyard. See Monsoon Stories from Monday.

Our private gully is an inspirational place. Outside is where I like to work in the mornings and just sit and stare in the evenings.

Shari taught me at Terra Bella on Whidbey that the land talks to you. It does.

The steep hillsides in our gully invite terracing. I began working with the acacia and palo verde trees, pruning them and digging berms around their trunks so I could water them. Circular berms developed into terraces.

Two parallel trails traversing the east side were separated by a steep slope, tricky to walk up or down because of the loose rocks. I had been planning steps and even a sitting area there.

The farthest garden tap — for now.

Some months ago I installed a water line and a garden tap there, which is my declaration of intent to develop. To develop means planting. Planting requires water. Water requires a ditch to in which to bury a PVC water line. You dig the ditch before you start fine tuning the trail. So the garden hose by the steep area was the first step.

Two weekend mornings, a trip to the mega-hardware emporium for concrete blocks and concrete mix, and three steps proudly await the hillside wanderer, anxious to alight upwards or carefully assist in the down climb. In the process, the land talked to me. After months and years of thinking about a flat area big enough for a bench, I realized it was not the place. People can sit on the steps, just like at Montmartre.

The last two weekend mornings, I pushed the edge of cultivation another forty feet down the eastern hillside. Forty feet means four sections of PVC pipe and a garden tap by a gnarly palo verde that used to be bigger until dry times made it lose several branches.

Forty feet of digging a terraced path.

I know it used to be bigger because of the big dead branch on the ground and three baby saguaros growing under where the branch used to serve as a latrine for the birds that feast on saguaro fruit and pass the seeds. That palo verde, like others in the gully, needs pruning and occasional water.

Connecting the steps to the farthest garden tap are forty feet of terraced trail cut into the hillside.

Every rock is precious. I sort them as I dig. Bigger rocks are piled together. They will be stacked to serve as a shallow retaining wall. The smaller rocks I salvage by shoveling the dirt onto a screen and sifting it. This rubble, the caliche is particularly good stuff, will become the surface for the trails themselves. Foot traffic compacts the jagged little rocks into a solid matrix that discourages little critters from digging their burrows.

I was apprehensive about heavy rains damaging terraces, but it turns out the desert is quite hardy — as long as one accounts for the flow of water. Stagecoach ruts from over a century ago are still visible in the graveyard down the street, and, going back some two thousand years, the network of foot-worn Hohokam and O'odham salt trading trails down to the Sea of Cortez are still visible in aerial photos.

Many more weekend mornings await. There are a few areas in our land that have overgrown agaves and aloes. O need to dig up shoots — mini-plants sent out by the main plant — and transplant them. And it's autumn, so it's time to plant a few mesquite trees.

Just Another Sunrise

One good sunset deserves a good sunrise. I can't write that these light shows are common because there is nothing common about them; but they are not uncommon in these parts.

Sunrise begins with a pale light so faintly yellow that it seems dull. A few minutes later, the eastern sky begins to glow more intensely. The clouds begin to reflect the red light until most of the sky is lit up like an explosion. The display changes with each passing minute until the sun rises above the horizon and the clouds fade into shades of grey.

Just Another Sunset

Clear and dry desert skies make for unobstructed evening and morning sunlight. Add a few fluffy clouds to reflect that red-hued late or early light and you have spectacular sunsets and sunrises.

My small and obsolete pocket camera (most people nowadays use telephones to take photographs; how au courant) can't do justice to the scene.

That red band framing the brightest strip of the sky was not ordinary; it was a red so deep and iridescent as to restore the original meaning to the word amazing. And the vast scale! How can a photo capture the magnitude of the sky?

We get these lights shows quite often; coyote howling and birds chirping add the sound shows. It's just another sunset, but I never tire of them. It's not something you can get used to because each is so spectacularly marvelous.

Rillito River Flows

Not often, but there are a few days when the Rillito is a river and not a dry wash.

We've had a good monsoon season in terms of rainfall. October is pretty late for monsoon rain, but we got a bonus last week, about an inch and a half over two days, courtesy of Hurricane Simon.

The Rillito River flowed. The Santa Cruz River flowed. The water around our back doors flowed, and with the help of a large shop broom, was swept to the West.

Everything was wet, glistening with water. The earth is saturated with the wet. The desert squishes as you step on it. You feel like you don't want to step on it. The heavy rain makes beautiful patterns on fine dirt, exposing pebbles to create a rich, living texture. 

The Tucson basin is green, and the vegetation is so happy that some trees and shrubs are flowering — again.

Rats and Telephones

We have telephone karma.

It took months to get a second line removed, two months to get a VDSL circuit installed, then the monsoon rain on September 8 took out our phone for a few days. Each such adventure involved hours on a phone wading through computer-managed questionnaires.  I've written about it critically in It-Takes-A-CenturyLink, or Para Continuar en Español, Oprime el Nueve.

Yesterday, the phone went dead. I feared either God or the phone company was getting even with me for being critical.

Today, Monday, we called repairs, waded through the computer-managed questionnaires, repeated my name, phone number, mailing address, last four digits of my SSN, and call-back number several times: once for the computer; the rest for the nice young female voice on the other end of the wireless line, probably in Manila.

The repair man came out early this afternoon.  Hey, that ain't bad.  That's pretty quick. The phone company truck pulled into our driveway and we eagerly met him at the door. Turned out he'd already fixed it. He showed us a broken telephone wire. A packrat had gotten into the phone company's box down the street and chewed through wiring.

So maybe it wasn't God's or the phone company's retribution. Maybe it was that big packrat I evicted from behind the storage box in our tower. Or maybe it was all of the above.