making progress

I am making progress on my second bathroom renovation. This has turned into a real project. I had to replace the subfloor, strip wallpaper, fix holes in the wall, rip out the old brown vinyl vanity, replace the toilet flange and the pipe leading up to it, and so on. I found some swinging 70s wallpaper hidden beneath the outer layer of wallpaper (see previous post), and I wonder if the bathroom had a disco ball also back in the day. Now I am tiling. Of course with tiling you have to cut some pieces of tile to fit the room. That has been a real time consuming task. I got the tile that I and others thought looked the best in the bathroom. It's porcelain and apparently the hardest tile you can get. It takes my wet saw a lot of time to cut through it. That makes me think that it will be durable, but pity the fool who drops anything on my bathroom floor! I am quite sure anything dropped will shatter to pieces. Under my tile I have a heating system that is hooked to a programmable thermostat. So I can set it to warm up the tiles just in time for my morning shower, which on fridays this semester is pretty early since I teach at 7:30. Then I can set it a little later for other days. I know my cat is looking forward to having heated tiles. He'll be sitting there all winter.

So what does this have to do with education? Well, just as with being a good teacher, success in home renovation projects requires a lot of patience. Sometimes things don't work right, like corroded toilet bolts will not come off, hacksaws will fall apart, batteries will run out of juice at just the wrong time, and when cutting pipe you have to recut 10 times to get it to the right length. You have to be able to roll with the punches, try new strategies (like a hacksaw and chisel for the toilet bolt...please note, using a hacksaw and chisel is not a euphemism for ways of dealing with students, it's what I really had to use with my toilet bolt), and keep your eyes on the end prize: for my bathroom renovation, a shiny new bathroom that is beautiful and sanitary, for teachers, motivated and learning students. That is, the measure of success of a teacher is not necessarily that students learn everything that they will need to know in one fell swoop, but that they learn some of what they need to know and are motivated to learn the rest.

Bathroom renovation

As the tiling adventure continues... I set to work on another bathroom a week or so ago. This one was upstairs so it had a plywood subfloor. But yes it had carpet. And the plywood underneath was rotten. This has turned out to be quite the project. I have had to do plumbing, demolition, reconstruction of a subfloor, wallpaper stripping (two layers!), and then I will do tiling and painting. Learning about all this stuff has been interesting. I have had to look online for multiple people who say the same things, ask at lowes/home depot, and so forth. I've been learning a lot and I appreciate being able to know how the job is getting done.