Gratitude Monday: Alea iacta est

Thursday I signed with a kitchen and bath contractor to remodel my primary bathroom. I started the research phase on this in June, and started contacting recommended companies in July, so It is a massive relief to have finally pulled the trigger to get this show on the road.

(If you’ll recall, I eliminated one of the six prospects after the “design consultation”, when they gave me a blind estimate of nearly $40k, without scope of work or line item costs. Another one went when I showed up at his showroom on a hot Saturday afternoon and he sat there sipping coffee without offering me so much as tap water. Then gave me a bid close to $30k. A third was much more custom—and costly—than I wanted, and a fourth left me to wallow in making all my choices without guidance.)

I will say that with every round of talking with someone, I learned more about bathrooms and what I actually wanted, so the hours and hours I spent in showrooms and online were not wasted. By the time I got my choices down to two companies, I felt that Elegant gave me more bang for the buck than My; their proposal is a couple of grand under my budget, which gives wiggle room for changes during construction. (Moreover, My’s total, which was already scraping my budget line, still left the toilet, vanity light and shower door to source for myself.)

In the end, Elegant sent me 11 rounds of proposals before I signed. The designer and the project manager came out on Saturday to do the final measurements and confirm scope. I’ll know on Wednesday when they can start work, and then—two weeks later—I’ll have a gleaming new bathroom.

(In addition to a vastly varying spread of cost proposals, the six companies’ estimates of actual project time ranged from eight days to six to eight weeks.)

To remind you: this is the current state of my bathroom:

This is the botch job that someone did with the floor tiles:

I’m grateful to have made it to this point and I'm truly looking forward to having a bathroom I actually want to use.

  

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Lighting up

As I reported recently, I’ve had to finally Do Something about my kitchen lighting. I just couldn’t stand that harsh light in the single fixture.

So on Tuesday the electrician—Jeff Littlejohn from JML Electric; if you’re in NoVa, he’s the man for you—came out. In less than 90 minutes he installed three flush-mounted recessed lights. When he flipped the switch, my ratty old kitchen looked like a showroom. It was amazing.

You cannot believe what a difference those three lights make. No shadows on the counter wherever I’m working. It looks…positive.

(On the downside, I can see every single place where I missed something when wiping down the counters. This is going to end up with more work for me.)

I’m going to think about a dimmer; I think I need to live with this brightness for a while. But I’m so happy I finally got this one ticked off my 2017 move-in list.

And yes: I'll finally have to call a guy to patch and paint over all the holes in the ceiling.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Domesticity

A couple of months ago, I came downstairs one morning to discover my kitchen ceiling was leaking. It took two visits from a plumber (because the shutoff main for this block of townhouses is inside one of the end units) and $600 to find and fix the leak (upstairs toilet in a bathroom I never use). And it left this gaping hole in the ceiling:

I thought to myself, “Self—this will be a forcing function. Instead of calling in a wallboard and painting expert for this hole, take this opportunity to install the recessed lighting you’ve needed in this kitchen for the seven years you’ve lived here. Remediate that single source of light, which throws a shadow over everything you do in this room. Do it! Now!”

Well, as I mentioned, this was two months ago. Turns out the forcing function wasn’t the huge hole in the ceiling, but the cold LED light bulb I put in the one ceiling lamp in the space. Because every single time I walk into the kitchen and flick on the light, I feel like confessing to something.

So the electrician came yesterday to spec out the project. Turns out that pendant lights are out of the picture because of the swing of one of the over-counter cabinets. So, just recessed lights. But no shadows while I'm working. 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

 

Restoration work

As reported here, almost two months ago, I experienced a flood of not-quite biblical proportions in my living room. It’s taken all this time of backing and forthing to finally square away a solution, but I am finally on the way to having my living room restored.

First of all we had to determine the cause—it seemed to be way too much water (it seeped up through the boards as you walked on them) to have been caused by my neighbor’s ice maker leak. Eventually the condo management company installed a new drain from the downspout between our two units, and there’s been no recurrence of interior water since then.

So, then I had to arrange for contractors to come out—through the condo management company, of course. Their fault, their contractors. The flooring guy came out, took measurements, and assured me at least six times in 20 minutes that they don’t do subfloors. So someone else needed to come out.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle because the condo people thought someone who turned out to be an architect was the right person to assess the situation. But—after he returned from two weeks holidaying out of the country (lucky him), I finally got the mold remediation people out last week to estimate the work.

Well, to shorten this story, as I write this, the entire ground floor is suffused with the smell of what I imagine are highly toxic chemicals, and industrial-strength dehumidifiers set at wind tunnel strength are making it impossible for me to engage in anything that requires hearing anything.

This will be me until Friday, LHR T3. Then they return to take back their kit, and I can schedule the flooring people.

Yay!

Sadly, standard

Since moving into my house a year ago, I’ve found another category of humanoid with the same work ethic, honesty and communication skills as recruiters.

Yes, I’m talking about contractors—those who can make repairs and improvements in your living space.

Finding contractors who combine competency in their declared area of expertise with reliability and accuracy is like finding a purple squirrel. You either go to Yelp or you ask your friends for recommendations, but even then it’s problematic.

I learned within the first couple of months here to ignore any of the names given me by my realtor: his plumbing firm came out twice; each time there were “lady, you should get this done” sizeable additions to the final invoice. And of the two handymen he recommended, one never responded at all to my call, and the other kept insisting on texting me even after I told him repeatedly that texting is not how I communicate. His estimate was also quite vague.

I lucked out on the electricians, whom I found via a neighborhood social media platform, Nextdoor.com. Every person I’ve dealt with at Autumn Electric has been professional, competent and good at explaining things to me. Plus—they clean up after their work. They didn’t give the lowest estimate, but I’ve had them out for two rounds of remediation work, and I’ll happily call on them for the improvements, too.

I just wish they did plumbing, too. Because I’m back on the grrr corner. I’ve called a total of six providers, four from Nextdoor and two recommended by friends.

Of the Nextdoor crowd, two flat out refused to come out to look at the job, and gave me estimates over the phone, based on hearing “replace a kitchen and two bathroom faucets”. I don’t do business without a written estimate, and I’m extremely uncomfortable with someone tossing one out without actually seeing what the issues are. So they got scratched straight away.

One came out, looked around and gave me a quote. He’d put himself forward on Nextdoor as being “cheap”, which isn’t necessarily a positive. Moreover, I gotta say that I had to air out the house after he left because the stench of cigarette smoke he exuded like to knocked me out. I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of him being around for hours in somewhat small spaces.

The fourth is someone I’ve used before. I found him agonizingly slow, although thorough, and he had to go out three times to Home Depot because he only completely scoped out what parts would be needed for the job immediately in front of him, not once for everything on his list. Still—thorough and competent. Although I got a little tired of him talking about Hungary, the paradise of the universe. (His parents brought him here when he was a boy; they’ve since returned and he goes “home” once a year, where he gets another injection of nationalism.) Dude—do not wave that flag in front of someone who’s ingested the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, interbellum Europe and nation-state Nazi collaborators.

He came out, did a thorough assessment, and pointed out that if I want to attach the dishwasher drain directly to the garbage disposal, he’ll have to uninstall and reinstall it, because it’s using the wrong size/type line (half-inch copper instead of three-quarter inch flex). Well, no one else had mentioned that, so I thought about it and put out a call to friends for recos.

Enter the last two. One joined the ranks of don’t-need-no-stinkin’-visit-to-quote, but embellished it by being rude, condescending and insulting. He quoted his rates ($110 for the first 75 minutes; $15 for each quarter hour thereafter), and tossed out what he thought it would take to replace a standard faucet. I asked what his definition of standard is, and he gave me a brand name (Moën, if you’re interested), not a description (center-set, single-hole, widespread, for starters). He then dissed the replacements I’ve already bought (“Take it back and get a Moën.”). When I suggested that there might be special circumstances, he reverted to his rates again, only very slowly.

Again—nothing in writing, incomplete assessment of the jobs to be done and the very real possibility that his upfront laziness could end up costing me a lot on the backend. Plus—in a free market, there are many plumbers out there who aren’t jerks to the customers’ faces. So he’s dismissed with prejudice.

The final outfit were quite professional, showing up in an extremely gaudy panel truck. They took a look at the kitchen sink, and were marking it down on their estimator app when I drew their attention to the dishwasher drain line issue. Oh. Well. Yeah—wrong size/type. Have to disconnect and reinstall. Okay, fine. But then they didn’t bother to look at the bathrooms because “they’re all standard.”

I got their app-generated estimate, but honestly: what kind of estimate doesn’t have a total? And there was only one bathroom faucet listed, not the two. Again—it’s an app; you couldn’t click on the function that indicates the number of instances, and the function that totals it all up?

So I called Mr. Hungary, and get this: he’s not sure when he can come do it. I gave him a three-day window next week, but… (He runs a renovation company and does this on the side.) Dude—you bid on the job, WTF?

Well, I just stayed quiet, and eventually he thought he might be able to do it next Thursday. Send thoughts and prayers for me, readers. I want the new faucets.