So Expensive: Part 3

Part 3:  Install New Garage Doors

(read part 1 and part 2 of our adventures in expensive house fix-ups)

As is fairly established by now, Husband likes spending time in the garage taking a certain vehicle apart.  The new house has a stand-alone garage.  The old house had a connected garage, and the washer and dryer were in the garage, so I would go into the garage on occasion (and inevitably manage to bash my arm on a tailpipe suspended, improbably, four and a half feet in the air).  But the new one is all on its own and literally jammed to the brim with the Old Car.  I never go in there.

Haunted by rusty ghosts.  Really, just rust.

But Husband is in there all the time.  He shimmies around the edges in the narrow path he's made to get to whatever rusty part of the Old Car he is disassembling at any given moment and doesn't even look like he minds it.  When he isn't working, or sleeping or baking pies, or hanging out with me discussing plot inconsistencies in the Transformers franchise, he's out in the garage working on his car.

Husband:  I think we need a new garage door.
Liz:  Why?  What's wrong with the old one?
Husband:  The springs are really old, and the door is really heavy, and I'm worried the garage door is going to collapse on me and kill me.
Liz:  We're getting a new garage door.

He wasn't delusional: the old garage door had no automatic lift and was made out of solid wood, and every time Husband lifted it, it made a terrifying dying-badger sound.  It was just that a) I knew it would probably be a bunch of money and b) after the heinous floor experience, I didn't know if we were ready to deal with another upgrade.  But Husband's life was at stake this time, so it had to be done.

Miraculously, this time, finding a service provider was easy: Husband found a guy on Yelp and called some people, and one of them was remarkable:

1. He actually replied
2. He seemed reasonable on the phone
3. He was willing to come out the very next day to give a quote...
4. ...even though the next day was Sunday.

It was amazing.

He came out on Sunday and brought a brochure of doors we could pick from.  He showed us the one he suggested, which was one of the cheapest ones, and a very good door as well, because it's really just a garage door and who needs...

Liz:  I want that other one.

Garage Door Man:  Oh.  Well, that one is a fair amount more money... 

Liz:  I don't care.  I want that one.

The Garage Door Man seemed baffled that I was willing to spend more money to have a better-looking garage door.  Or maybe he was trying to be sensitive: on the weekends, I generally dress like a twelve-year-old and I'm not old enough looking that when I'm dressed like a twelve-year-old that people can see, ahem, another sixteen years past that.  

Aside:  One time, right after I had taken the bar exam, I sat on a plane next to a director at a company I really like and chatted very intelligently with him about the directions his industry was taking (as I'd done a 120-page paper on that industry my last term of law school).  Mr. Director kept doing double takes / expressing incredulity that I had a JD - because I was wearing jean shorts and an old t-shirt from a mock trial tournament.  Whatever!  It was summer!  I had just taken the bar exam.  I'm not some person insistent on throwing back to the 60s by dressing up to sit on a sweaty Southwest flight.   

Machine washable clothes save the world, too.  Down with dry cleaning.

So the Garage Door Man probably through we were stone cold broke and I was some sort of 18-year-old bride.  Instead of what I actually am, which is a stubborn lady who intends to buy new garage doors only once in the rest of her existence and is thus going to get attractive ones that look like carriage doors.

(Which Husband also wanted.  I'm not some kind of garage door tyrant wife.  Which is going to be the title of my next blog.)

The Garage Door Man nicely acquiesced, and began telling us about his nine (nine!) children and beloved wife while he went to inspect the current door.  Which was the best part, because our garage door was no regular garage door.  As you can see, within the door was another, regular-style door, complete with glass panes and a locking doorknob, though you have to step up over the ledge to enter through it.  Also, the garage door had in it a separate cat door.

This was part of the reason it was so heavy and why Husband and I were genuinely concerned he could get smushed under it.

Garage Door Man, admiringly:  You know, I've seen doors in a garage door before, but I've never seen a cat door in the garage door before.  Two doors within the door.  That's a first.

We were pretty proud to have a garage door unlike any the Garage Door Man had seen before.

We agreed on a price and signed the contract.  After he left, though:

Husband:  I'm sorry - I forgot to negotiate with him at ALL.

Liz:  Don't worry about that - he has like a million children to feed.  I don't want to negotiate with that guy.  

The very next day, Garage Door Man sent the oldest of his million children over to install the new garage door, which did require Husband to roll part of the disassembled Old Car out of the garage.

But other than that, the garage installation was easy and quick - the guy worked outside on it for half a day, and by 5 p.m. we had a brand-new garage door that went up and down by itself and had a nice keypad on the outside.  Just like regular people do.  No cat door.

  

Which is really a loss in case Husband ever trains a cat to help him put the Old Car back together.

So Expensive: Part 2

Part 2:  Install new floors.

[read part 1 and part 3 on how our new house is proving so expensive to fix up]

The old floors in the kitchen and family room were insane tile of the brownish-shape-pattern variety. It was not a good look.

If you look closely, you can see that the pattern is repeating perpendicular dog bones.

The rest of the downstairs had hardwood floor, so we decided to get hardwoods to match. We knew it would cost, but would be worth it in the long run. So all we had to do was find someone to do it. Easy enough right?

WRONG. It is unimaginably hard to pay someone to install a new floor for you.

I dont’ know if there is a profession-wide state of willful insouciance amongst floorpersons, or if floor installers are just rolling in the dough and don’t need work, or if they all just dislike Husband and I personally. But it was nigh impossible to get someone to do hardwood floors in our house. Here is a flowchart of how our process with hiring these guys went:

Finally, we hired someone, which after all of that felt like a miracle. Floor Guy had the excellent credentials of "being the first person to have answered his phone." Our standards were low.

We bought the wood from the guy.  That meant waiting for the wood to ship, which took a couple weeks.  And then once the wood arrived, we had to leave it to "cure" in the house. Apparently wood is moody and needs to get used to the ambiaaaaaaance before you install it.

That would have been just fine. We didn't mind having a ton of planks of wood in the family room - we didn't have any furniture to put in there anyway. It was fine having planks of wood around for Husband's birthday party.

What wasn't fine was that by the time the wood had cured, the floor guy had vanished. He wouldn't answer calls or e-mails. Oh, had I mentioned?  This guy didn't have a website.  He wasn't actually on yelp.  All we had of him was a phone number, that he wouldn't answer, and an e-mail address, that apparently meant nothing to him.

It was like he had been a figment of our imaginations, except for the pile of red oak he had left.  Which meant that we restarted the process:

Finally, one of the earlier non-answerers picked up and agreed to come install the floor. When he came by, he made a big fuss that we had ordered waaaaayyy more wood than we needed. Waaaayyyy more. Husband ignored Floor Guy #2's histrionics and firmly said, "Okay, fine, we will be glad to have the extra for spare then."

We set up a schedule with Floor Guy #2 to install the floor.  But this meant first that Husband and I had to manage to move the entire refrigerator through various narrow passages in our house out of the kitchen.  We were going to put the fridge in the laundry room.  Except it turns out our fridge is wider than the door to the laundry room, or to the bedroom next to the kitchen, or to anywhere but the back door.

So onto the back porch it went.  I wish I had a picture of how our back porch now looked like we were trying some avant-garde experimental kitchen project.  No, wait, it just looked weird.  And was very inconvenient to have to go outside.  In the winter.  To get milk.

Did I mention it was the winter?  Everything in the refrigerator doors froze.

Floor Guy #2 got to installing the floor.  Which you'd think is a fairly simple process.  But it wasn't at all; it was instead days and days of process:

1. FG2 comes to remove the old tiles from the floor.
2. FG2 comes the next day to sand down the gunk from under the old tiles.
3. FG2 comes to install the new wood.
4. FG2 comes to install the pegs and the wood filler on the wood.
5. The wood filler cures endlessly.
6. FG2 comes to sand the floor.

All of the above was complicated by the fact that he was incapable of showing up when he had said he would, or of informing us when he would show up.  So Husband would leave work early to wait around for the floor guy to show up, when he wouldn't; I would be at home on a conference call and answer the door to find, unexpectedly, that today was evidently Sanding Day.

Once he got the wood down, at long last, it looked nice, but pretty raw.

And for blah blah blah reasons, he couldn't stain and finish the floor (which itself was a multi-day process) for another x number of days because he probably enjoyed making our lives difficult. Don't tell me it wasn't intentional.  He could see the fridge out on the back porch.

So for another week or two we stepped very gingerly and carefully on the unfinished floor on our way out to the back porch to the refrigerator.

The floor guy finally stained the floor after Husband signed a BLOOD CONTRACT that the stain was in fact the stain we wanted.  And Husband has a good eye, because it looked awesome:

We were enjoying the finished product until we had a near-simultaneous recollection of a conversation that had happened approximately 300 trips to an outdoor refrigerator ago.

Liz: "Where's all the extra wood he said we would have?"
Husband: "Maybe it's in the garage?"

It wasn't in the garage. It was nowhere.

When we called Floor Guy #2 to ask him where he had taken the rest of our wood, he played dumb. I don't think it was a tough act for him. But he wasn't prepared to deal with two disgruntled homeowners, one of whom was a cranky lawyer with experience in litigating over home construction cases. And if there's one thing you learn in law school, it's that the one still holding the money has the power.

After writing a series of terse letters to Floor Guy #2 (i.e. Stealy McStealerson) that featured the charm of a young litigator and the lyrical elegance of an engineer, we finally agreed to pay Floor Guy #2 a certain amount, which was less than he had quoted us, to compensate for the disappearing wood.

A slightly less aggravating detail of this was that the new flooring also involved removing the old wood-burning stove that was in one corner of the room, which took up a lot of space and made little sense in a place with central heating.

Husband wanted to keep it because it was old.  I pointed out that we had plenty of old stuff around already and that the entire garage was, in fact, full of something old.  He agreed.  We replaced the large black eyesore of a stove...

with a large black eyesore of a really old TV.

But the stove didn't show me episodes of Chopped while I wash dishes, so this is definitely a net improvement.  Though the downside of the TV is it also shows me HGTV, including episodes of shows where people effortlessly install hardwood floors in a single day, and there's no flowchart I can draw to show how enraging that is after all of these shenanigans.

So Expensive: Part 1

"Fixing up our new house is so expensive."

"How expensive is it?"

"It's so expensive Jay-Z raps about fixing up our new house."
"It's so expensive it's becoming suggested as a comparable alternative to law school."
 "It's so expensive they sell it exclusively at Whole Foods."
"It's so expensive Kim and Kanye made it a part of their wedding."

In addition to re-painting the cabinets, which was well worth it to eliminate the pumpkin color scheme, there were a few more necessary things to do to the new house... all of which were expensive.

Part 1: Installing a new oven

The old oven was a double oven, which is great for if you want to bake a ton of stuff, which, ahem, I always do!  But it was really old.  You just looked at it and knew it was really old.  The clock/timer had analog roll-y numbers on it, which is practically Pleistocene.

I mean... come on.

The black oven and orange cabinets have a nice Halloween look.

In addition, there was no built in microwave, and I didn't want to bring our crappy old countertop microwave, which had lived for many years under Husband's dorm room bed (that was the place one kept a microwave in our dorms. they were small.)  So we decided to get a new oven, which was a microwave on top (that could also be a small convection oven) and the oven on the bottom.

Getting a new oven was especially feasible because I got a discount on appliances because someone at my law firm either once sued someone or defended against a suit from someone on behalf of an appliance manufacturer.  I was pretty jazzed about getting a discount, because I love a good sale.  But it was terrifying how much appliances cost even WITH a discount.  Who decided refrigerators are a four-figure operation?  How did this oven cost twice as much as my 3D plasma TV?  Either there is some shady oven cartel happening or TV manufacturers are getting a raw deal.

Once I was over my sticker shock with ovens, I bit the bullet and bought a new one, strengthened by the thought of how ugly the old one was.

The game was afoot.  The first task was to remove the old oven.  Neither of us had previously pondered what one should do once one has removed an enormously heavy oven from a wall.  The solution we settled on was to set it on a milk crate as if we were on  MythBusters testing the load-bearing capacity of milk crates.

Ready, steady...

Answer: A milk crate can support at least one oven.  

Once the oven was out, we discovered that there was a different shade of green paint underneath the orange paint on the cabinets.  How deep did the conspiracy go???

Look above the cooktop and to the right of the ovenspace.

Because this would be shorter than the old double oven, we got a contractor to build a space for a new drawer on the bottom (and in the meantime the painting occurred). 

Husband got excited for me to blog about the oven because, in his words:

•   It was really heavy to move the old oven out and the new one in
•   It took forever to install the new oven
•   He has a bunch of pictures of the installation process.

Unfortunately, I think he forgot the main obstacle to me blogging about it, which was.... I totally left him to do all of the work and didn't help at all.  Everything was too heavy!  The Brothers were over to help with the lifting!  I .... am horrible and selfish and didn't want to deal with it and don't have experience hardwiring appliances or ANYTHING ELSE and... had important iPad games to play.  I only helped a tiny bit at the very end to side in the new oven once they had it installed.

I know.  I am a terrible person.  Unlike Husband, who is a brilliant person who can fix literally anything.  It's very impressive.

What I can tell you is that this oven BARELY fits onto the wall.  It has like half a millimeter of clearance on either side.  If we put too many coats of paint on  the wall, it won't fit anymore.

It also has a digital display because this is America.

But I do remember this.  Once the new oven was installed, we were waiting on the new drawer to come for the space beneath the new oven.  Husband came in to the house holding a drawer.

Liz:  Did the contractor drop that off?

Husband:  No, I just found this in the garage?

Husband experimentally tried the drawer in the hole in the wall - the hole that, keep in mind, the contractor had JUST BUILT and built expressly to fit our new oven.

The drawer fit perfectly.

?!?!???

We were both baffled.

Liz:  But he's already building the new drawer.

Husband:  Well, now we have this one as a spare, I guess?

It was HIGHLY improbable.  But I guess with all of the money we paid the contractor to build and for the new oven, it was nice to find something - however duplicative - for free.

return next week for parts 2 and 3 of the saga in "Home ownership is expensive, no duh Liz, everyone knows that"!

Fifty Shades of White

Our new house needed, ahem, some work. I had sold myself on the idea that the funky yellow-and-burgundy tile plus creamsicle-orange sink and bathtub of the downstairs bathroom was…. retro. The toilet that isn’t on a perpendicular axis to the wall of the powder room? Quirky and still decidedly… usable! The pink paint on the room off the kitchen? Barely noticeable… very pale pink indeed.

But I really couldn’t deal with a few things: the orange-and-green cabinets, the janky old oven that was fresh out of 1981, and the tile floor in the kitchen.

I knew kitchen renovations were expensive. But my favorite home improvement bloggers have taught me that paint is magic. So I decided the first thing we needed to do was to paint the orange and green cabinets. And by “paint” I mean “pay someone to paint.” Husband didn’t trust me with a paintbrush anymore, and cabinets seemed harder than walls, so I acquiesced.

But first, I needed to pick a shade of white.

Last time I painted, I was pretty chill about shade-picking. I grabbed a couple of the paint-color-sheet-thingies at Home Depot, looked at them a bit at home, said “Dolphin Gray it is!” and bought the paint.

This time I lost my mind over paint selection.

I first decided that we needed to get Fancy Paint. There was a time in my life when I didn’t realize that different brands of paint had different levels of fanciness.  That was a time in the past, from before I started reading home improvement blogs.  And once I learned that there were different fancinesses of paint, I knew that for our kitchen cabinets of the very first home we owned, we were going to get some DANGED fancy paint.

I quickly ran into the first problem with Fancy Paint. Your Regular Paint is sold at Home Depot, which is open whenever, and I know where it is and I just wander in and get paint and no one looks at me funny for wearing my paint pants and an old Mock Trial t-shirt covered in drops of Dolphin Gray. Fancy Paint is sold at Fancy Specialty Paint Stores, which have hours like 4 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the week of the month where the moon is waning. Painters must work at ridiculous times of day.

Not being an anthropomorphized Disney songbird, I don’t wake up with the dawn and I don’t wake up early enough to leave any spare time before work. So with all of the Fancy Paint Shoppes closed by the time I left work, lunch was the only time I could go get paint chips. So I drove into town to the Fancy Paint Shoppe.

I walked in and wandered to the paint chips section, where I proceeded to spend forty minutes staring blankly at a selection of approximately two frillion colors of white. It was mesmerizing. No, paralyzing. A woman offered to help me several times and I declined in mumbles. Finally I snapped out of it, grabbed every paint chip with something white on it, and bought three tiny sample pots of white paint.

the madness

The next few days I was a menace to all around me.

Liz: “Vanilla milkshake is definitely out, because it’s way too gray. I’m really going back and forth between Bavarian Cream and White Chocolate. I want something warm, but Mayonnaise is too yellowy.”

My coworker: “I’m starving. Do you want to get lunch?”

[the next day]

Liz: “I've tried a bunch... but I feel like Oxford White is the white I want, but none of the stores have it, even though it's listed on the paint company website!  And I feel like it is the IDEAL white!”

Mom: “Didn’t you say that about Mountain Peak White yesterday?”

[the next day]

Husband: “You promised you wouldn’t buy any more paint samples.”

Liz: “Well, technically I didn’t - they didn’t have this one in samples so I had to buy a quart of the actual paint. But I have a really good feeling about this one! It’s crisp linen!”

Husband: “Wasn’t the LAST one Crisp Linen?”

Liz: “No, that was Linen White! Totally different!”

[the next day]

Liz: “Did you get my text?”

Dad: “I did but… what am I even looking at, here?”

---------------

I finally settled on a shade of white: Cream Froth. It looked a lot like Mountain Peak White. It also looked a lot like Crisp Linen. But Cream Froth it was, and I was pleased to have selected one of the delicious-sounding ones.

We were finally a go with the painter.

It was so exciting the day we saw all the doors get de-orangified:

And it looked SO MUCH better when it was done….

In case you had forgotten how it looked orange…

Then all that was left was the installation of the new oven.  Poor Husband.  But that's another story.

Hopefully the improved cabinetry is worth all the paint-shade-madness I inflicted on everyone around me. I’ve hidden all of the leftover paint samples in the garage so Husband will hopefully forget about how I went crazy. And I had almost forgotten, too, until we went to Home Depot yesterday to look at some blinds* for the house. We had identified the kind we wanted when the guy asked us which color we wanted...

There was white white. Pure white. Silk white. Optic white. Chantilly. I started seeing spots in front of my eyes…

Husband: “Silk white.”

Liz (whispered): “Thank you.”




*None of the following should surprise you given what I have told you about this house:  There were blinds on the house originally, but they were tan-colored rusting metal mini-blinds.  The realtors apparently threw a fit about them and made the owners take them off before showing the home.  We found them in the garage after we moved in.  They were pretty gross.

Seeing Orange: Functional Adults Aren't Scared of a Weird Paint Job

If Husband hadn’t already been sold on the barn-like appearance of the house I found on Zillow, he was sold when he saw how old it was. He has a noted fondness for old things. The older, the better. He gets really excited when we see, for example, rusty farm equipment somewhere. He likes things more the older they get. If you think about it, it’s a rare and excellent quality in a spouse.

So we headed off to the open house. Excitingly, Sassy was in town so she could come with us to look at it, which was wonderful since she has fantastic taste in all things. As we pulled up outside the house, we saw a young couple moving in across the street and the woman had on a shirt from our own dear Alma Mater University, so I was pleased already.

Before we got out of the car, I cautioned Husband: “If we like it, don’t show too much excitement. We have to stay cool or it could drive up the price.”

Husband, with a suspicious look that seemed misplaced: “Yes, I AGREE we should stay calm.”

I gave him the side-eye and we all went in.

And, dear reader, it was so great. It was 50% bigger than the house we had put an offer in. There were high ceilings with awesome beams.

It had TWO AND HALF bathrooms. It had a back yard with grass and a deck.

And I may have lost my cool a bit. I think I was beaming. Our realtor had to do damage control later when their realtors called her and said, “I think your client really liked it!”

Now, of course, it wasn’t all one-hundred-percent perfect. In fact, a person with lesser vision (and a person who hadn't spent two months of funemployment watching HGTV look easy) might have been scared off by, say, the orange kitchen:

… or an insane wood stove thing:

…. or a bathroom with a strangely angled toilet:

...or another one with insane tile:

No, those didn’t deter me.  Because I had decided this house was going to be ours. And when I get resolved on something, that’s when I come the closest to being a functional adult. Which was a good thing, since we were fixing to become homeowners - which is the third most mature thing I can think of (after parents and elected officials).

Sassy liked it too.  Husband liked it too (because it had a two-car garage he could fill with rusty car parts).

All we had to do was make the offer, get it accepted, and close.

(Yeah, I know, you see it coming too.)

At Long Last: Bathroom Repaint Days 4 Through Whatever

The bathroom is finally finished.

Perhaps, dear reader, you thought I had died in my quest to improve the paint color of my beleaguered guest bathroom, succumbing to severe DIYtis induced by too much HGTV and insufficient sun exposure.  Indeed, it was close.  But I have emerged, phoenix-like, not from the ashes but from the pulmonary-disease causing spackle dust.  And when I arose, it was in a nicely painted bathroom.

When last I left you, dear reader, I hadn't even begun actually to paint.  But rather than describe in exhaustive narrative the rest of the process, I shall provide it to you in a series of snappy statistics and summaries.

Day 4:  Actually Painting

Time spent painting first coat, using, alternately, a large roller, a small roller, and a paintbrush:  3 hours

Time spent painting second coat:  1.5 hours

Time spent, before painting anything, realizing that I had removed all the lighting from the bathroom and wrangling Husband's intense work lights from the garage into the bathroom so I could see:  30 minutes

Number of elevation devices needed:  2 (a stepstool and a ladder)

Number of soccer sandals remaining intact and unripped after painting:  1

Number of insane blurry pictures taken in attempt to document painting task without getting paint on iPhone:  3

Quantity of mess created:  Above average

At this point, I thought I was done painting.  

*Cue Jaws two-note musical motif*

Day 5:  Thinking about removing the tape

Amount of painter's tape removed:  2-6 inches, before wigging out, realizing the paint was coming with the tape, and deciding the paint must not be dry enough yet 

Additional amount of time allocated to let paint dry before removing tape:  24 hours

Day 6:  Removing the tape

Amount of painters tape removed easily:  3 inches
Amount of painters tape that would not be removed at all and remained stuck under the paint:  about 10 feet

Amount of painters tape that started tearing the paint when pulled away:  all the rest

Amount of painters tape removed using indignation and Exacto knives:  all of it minus 3 inches

AUGH

Amount of residual damage from tape tearing up recently applied paint:  substantial

This was only one small part.

Time spent Googling painter's tape before realizing you are supposed to remove it while the paint is still wet:  20-40 minutes

Number of fixtures rehung:  4 (mirror, lights, towel hook, towel rack)

Day 7:  Sulking

Number of small paintbrushes (for retouching) ordered on amazon.com:  1

Number of shower caddies evidently stolen by gardeners whilst said shower caddy awaited rinsing from death-dust in the yard:  1

Day 8:  Not painting because I was going to dinner with my friend and didn't want to get paint in my hair

Day 9:  Retouching

Number of good feelings about dragging all the ladders in the bathroom again:  0

Average amount of time I left painters tape on the wall: 30 seconds

Total amount of time spent touching up edges and scraping off excess paint on tile: 4 hours

Colors of sandals worn over socks (yes, fellas, I'm taken):  2

Quantity of nap left in dried paint by stupid cheap small roller:  nonzero (so frustrating)

Number of photos taken of the retouching process:  0 (due to total sulkiness)

Day 10 through 22:  Avoiding Thinking About It

Because:  It was so annoying with the tape!  Ugh!

Including:  Not writing a blog post concluding the series

But... drumroll please....

The Final Results!

New art!  That I made!  Surprise!

By the way, the paint TOTALLY covered the staples I put through the rubber baseboard thing into the wall.  So I remain unpersuaded that it is inappropriate to staple your home when necessary.  Frankly, that stapled bit is probably the best construction in this house.

Here's a before-and-after comparison of the room (befores on the left, afters on the right):

I am using the trick of having the bathroom be cleaner in the "after" shot

Finale

All in all, I think it looks better, though the difference doesn't show up as starkly in these photos as it does in real life.  The paint is a lot nicer.  I am glad I did it, though I underestimated the difficulty involved in painting crappy drywall.  A bathroom is hard enough to paint when you have to avoid cabinets and tiles, but when the wall itself is bumpy and rotting and otherwise problematic, it makes the task so much harder.  This job was so much harder than it was to paint my old bedroom in my parents' house, for example.  

Also, this whole shebang would have been a lot easier if I'd known you need to remove painter's tape while the paint is still wet.  That added an extra day of work with touch-ups that I might not have needed to do otherwise.  

The bathroom looks nicer now.  But I don't intend to do any more intensive improvements solely for my landlord's benefit.  This would feel a lot more worth it if I owned this house.  And frankly, if I owned this house, I'd hire someone so I didn't have to do it myself.  Though I'm not convinced even a paid painter could have dealt with this crappy drywall all that much better than I did.

phew.

Discussion Questions:

Why do you think Liz's gardeners stole her shower caddy out of her backyard? Should she go to the trouble of trying to ascertain their identity from her landlord to confront them with the theft, considering the landlord will probably use the instance somehow to raise Liz's rent?