… but not without a lot of swearing.

Just like gravity is a law of Physics, the fact that one project will always lead to another is a law of DIY. Always.

Which is why I was supposed to spend Saturday laying the last section of stick tiles, but instead found myself staring at this:

When the half-bath was added to the basement, they did not use drywall for the walls. I’m not sure if drywall even existed at that time, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this occurred in the same era in which it was common to patch holes in the wall with scotch tape.

Oh, wait. That was never. Musta just been the idiot previous owners then.

Anyway, the 1/4″ composite board or whatever-it-is was obviously not holding up real well, and I spent some time (at 8 AM Saturday) just looking at it deciding whether or not this was the appropriate time to tear this shit down. MysteryMan saw me checking out the trim around the bathroom door as he left and said “What are you thinking about, now?” Because it has only taken him a year to figure out what that glint in my eye means. And besides. I had two perfectly good sheets of drywall (bought specifically for this purpose three years ago) standing five feet away from me.

Which is how I ended up spending an hour and a half on Saturday morning standing on a bucket of kitty litter doing this:

Since holes were drilled and the new plumbing was set through the cheap ass plywood walls, and there was not enough room to get a decent saw or really any cutting utensil up there. That’s a jewelers saw that I’m using by the way. With a blade that is meant to cut wax. It was not a fun experience.

This is the end result of about 2 hours of very frustrating work.

Then of course I had to cut the drywall, and because the washer and dryer were moved out into the work space… this is how much area I had to cut a 4′x8′ piece.

Yeah. That’s it. Which is why when I was trying to cut it down to the right width, I came up with this ingenious idea.

I was having serious issues holding the straightedge on a vertical piece of drywall and cutting at the same time. So in the interest of not cutting off a finger, I decided to bang some finish nails in to hold up the straight edge while I cut. Worked beautifully.

What did not work beautifully was attaching that shit to the wall. The fact that I don’t have an additional 50 to 100 lbs of weight with which to leverage screws into pretty much anything has been a huge problem of mine. Also a huge problem of mine is getting really effing pissed about that fact before considering that maybe I need to adjust the tools I’m working with… a fact MysteryMan kindly pointed out to me when I was banging my head against the wall later that day. He lent me a bit that worked much better with the drywall screws and at least let me get them far enough into the studs that the drywall can be patched properly.

After that fun little escapade it took until Monday night for me to get the floor finished. However, there is considerable improvement between this:

And this:

CONFESSION:
I have done the same thing twice to MysteryMan so far on the basement project… once with the refrigerator, and once with the washer and dryer. Basically I make pouty faces at him and ask him to move some heavy object that I don’t feel like dealing with because after all I am a girl, therefore small weak and helpless… no? Then three days later when he isn’t around I somehow manage to move these things around to their proper places without, you know, a problem.

After he sees that I have done this, I always get a narrowed-eyed look from the man, which could possibly mean one of three things:
1.) Why did you make me do that at 8 am if you were perfectly capable of doing it yourself?
2.) Why did you bother the neighbor to come over here and help you move that because I seriously doubt you did it by yourself regardless of what you say and/or write on your website?
3.) Why did you do that by yourself, you could have pulled a muscle, ruined the floor, and/or killed yourself? You are lucky I am here to look after you now.

I don’t know why I do this to him other than because he is a boy, and I thought for sure one of the reasons they exist (other than opening pickle jars) is to move heavy objects when girls don’t want to. This is obviously a sexist point of view, and I’m going to make an effort to stop using both of my X-chromosomes to get out of heavy lifting… sometime in the next decade.

For a while there I thought I may actually have lost my project-addiction, killed off by textbooks and lack of weekends. So it came as an immense relief when I dragged myself down to the basement after work today, and 20 minutes later (despite the fact that I have a job interview early tomorrow morning) found myself doing this…

STICK TILES!

As you can see, the epoxy (maybe) paint on the floor was more than likely mis-applied by those same people who thought the best way to patch holes in the walls was to cover them with scotch tape and then paint over it, and so it isn’t holding up real well.

As a general rule in my house (and in life) I am vehemently opposed to linoleum. A nice linoleum tile costs just about what a plain ceramic tile does and in the celebrity deathmatch of ceramic vs. linoleum I think it’s pretty obvious who would win.

However…

This is my work space. While I don’t want destroyed semi-epoxied concrete for a floor, I’m definitely going to do some damage to whatever is down there eventually, and at thirty-cents a square foot (and fairly easy to replace) stick tiles seemed like just the thing. They are probably more formally called self-adhesive tiles, but this is DIY people, I choose to do my own thing. Even with naming conventions.

Anyway. This is probably the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Clean the floor. Measure the tile placement. (again, you are supposed to start in the center of the floor and work outward in a step-like formation. And againDIY means I choose not to follow the rules when I don’t want to.

This is obviously me, making sure the stick tile is evenly adhered to the floor. Notice the bright fricking red of my hands. I guess that I was pushing really hard. Also, try not to notice the 80′s headband. I just whacked a lot of my hair off and that’s the only way to keep it out of my face.

I noticed this picture on the box about 20 square feet in…

And I stared at it a minute saying over and over again, really? a rolling pin. So I though, okay, what the hell, I look like a lobster from the wrists down, I’ll give it a shot. So I got a rolling pin from the kitchen and tried this for about 30 seconds, feeling like a complete moron all the while. And it didn’t even work that well, if at all.

So ha ha Armstrong stick tile direction writers, you got me. Rolling pin on the floor. Good joke.

When I finally got back to business I ended up with about 35 of 300 square feet that needs to be done down there.

Infinitely better, no?

You know what I’ll be doing this weekend.