The Joys of Home Ownership

Have you ever read the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie?A little mouse is offered a cookie, then he needs a glass of milk, then a napkin to wipe his milk moustache.  He looks in the mirror and notices he needs a trim, then he needs to sweep up and gets carried away and cleans the entire house.  And so it goes on and on all because one mouse wanted one cookie.

I think I can write a sequel.  If you Give a Lime a Shower  Door. I requested a new door for the shower in the master bathroom because the original one was plastic and just totally resistant to being cleaned properly.  It also had a broken latch so keeping it closed required some interesting jerry-rigging due to its strange design.  Saturday, Mr. Lime removed the old door in order to install the  new door.  It was a procedure he expected to take no more than the weekend.  Oh what hopeful fools we are.

This is what my bathroom looks like today.  This and worse is what it will look like for some time to come.  When the old door was removed it pulled tiles with it...revealing soaked wallboard.  When Mr. Lime removed the soaked wallboard it revealed a stud with all the structural integrity of a dish sponge.  When he continued to remove whatever was damaged trying to find where it started and ended he got as high as his head and through the floor.  Oh and the wall opposite the shower is also squishy under the tile.  So a simple shower door is leading to the gutting of one bathroom.  Since it shares a wall and pipes with the main bathroom and it's clear there is some sort of major plumbing/moisture issue it means we will be gutting the second bathroom sooner rather than later as well.

Oh yeah, did I mention that in this extreme cold we've been babying  other pipes that the brilliant designers/builders of this house ran through a cantilevered and uninsulated portion of the house.  There is some inspired design, let me tell ya.

All I can say is I am glad Mr. Lime is handy enough to be able to fix this and Calypso works at a local hardware store where she gets a pretty nice employee discount.  This is gonna be an unpleasant wallet cramp but it could be a whole lot worse.  I didn't even have a temper tantrum like this time!