I am NOT the Hawkeye Pierce of Plumbing

This has been the strangest year in my many years.  The current global pandemic has really turned the world inside out.  We are fortunate to have a house set in the woods of Freeport where we can wander and hike and explore without fear of contact with others.  In this COVID world, getting out of the house and breaking up the routine is key.  We are able to do that.  That is blessing level one.  Level two is having the time to spend on projects around the house, and we are recipients of that as well.  As a teacher, I was teaching from home for three months.  Once I found the rhythm of online teaching and worked out the major kinks, I did seem to gain some free time not normally present in the spring.  And while I normally work all summer, I had planned some weeks of vacation time at the close of the school year.  As far as projects around the homestead, we have made the most of that time!

There is so much to recap in the past couple months of doing and renovating, but we are going to begin at the end, with Sunday’s project.  Yes, I managed to start and finish a project in one day.  Bite your tongue, I can hear your laughter all the way on this side of the Internet.  Sunday was Kris’s birthday, and one of her quarantine-year birthday presents was the installation of a potting bench in the shed, a place where she can store gardening equipment and supplies, as well as pot and repot plants (who knew plants got to move around so much?). 

Like the ol' woodstove, this is also a resurrection/repurposing story.  We are in the midst of renovating our bathroom, a task we have broken into two phases.  The second phase will come in the winter or spring of 2021, and largely be done by professionals (that way we can have a bathroom within a reasonable time – think back to your laughter over me getting a project done quickly; it is not a common occurrence).  That will include the installation of a new shower, new tub, new door, rerouting lots of plumbing, tearing out a small wall, and likely a new floor.  No one wants to wait for me to get through all that, least of all my wonderful wife.

The first phase, however, has just about concluded.  This winter, Kris found the perfect double-sink/vanity combination and it arrived at the house in February, delivered directly to the hallway on the second floor one room away from its final destination.  All we needed was a professional licensed plumber to come and install it.  A real plumber for two reasons:  one, the addition of a second sink meant rerouting the existing plumbing and two, Kris no longer trusts me with any plumbing-related tasks.  Okay, sometimes after I complete plumbing projects, a plumber is required for various reasons (often water related).  I like to think it is analogous to Hawkeye Pierce or the other surgeons of the 4077^th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital asking the nurse to “close” the patient once they have finished their expert surgering skills.  I believe this is where Kris would add her version to this analogy:  when the “nurse” steps in, the patient wasn’t squirting blood halfway to the ceiling.  I have no idea what she means, and I hope she is not casting aspersions on my plumbing abilities.  As a kid, I was always proud that the fictional Hawkeye hailed from the fictional Crabapple Cove here in the real state of Maine.  That has nothing to do with our story, it just occurred to me.

A base motif in our home, built in 1991, is knotty pine.  It is everywhere.  Doors, baseboards, floors, and cabinets.  Windows, both trim and frame.  There is a lot of natural wood around.  Luckily, they stopped at the walls, so it does not feel like we are trapped in an old camp tucked in the Western foothills of Maine.  On our epic renovation team, Kris is the Minister of Aesthetics.  I do not even have a basic understanding of how colors and styles go together, so if something is tired or does not look good, unless egregious (e.g. paneling, I get paneling), I have to take her word for it.  The master bathroom was among the biggest offenders of the raw wood look, as the entire vanity counter and shelf below were slabs of inch and a half pine with a sink and plumbing dropped in the middle of it.  This vanity has been in Kris’s sights for some time, and with the installation of the new vanity, it was unceremoniously taken dismantled and shipped out to the shed in pieces.

"Ooh, your pine is so knotty..."

That is when Kris, who doubles as the Commandant of Clever Ideas, found the repurpose for our tired counter:  a potting bench.  We talked it through, propped things up as a mock up, and made a plan.  I then shunted the birthday girl out of the steamy hot shed so I could get to work.  My role?  Most commonly I serve as the Under Secretary of Slowly Getting Things Mostly Done and then Losing Momentum.  But not today.

While Kris watered gardens and went out to grab lobsters for the backyard birthday celebration, I toiled away reconstructing the bathroom fixture in its new location.  All the pieces were reused.  The only scrap wood needed was already in the shed.  Screws and nails were already in stock.  A wooden shelving unit (one of several we scored from the school where I work when they were dismantled) found a new permanent home as well.  I cut its top off creating a base to serve as the second anchor point.  It was screwed into the floor.  The right side anchor point, which previously dispersed toilet paper to us when doing our business, was anchored to the wall.  The gap between studs was filled with 2x4s at counter height to extend the counter and prevent the disappearance of small things off the back.  The last bit of recreation was knocking the nails out of the trim pieces that held of the lower shelf and attaching them to the shed wall and the shelving unit.

Reusing has been popular this summer.

For the final step I slid the lower shelf into place and lay the countertop onto the now sturdy structure.  Tools were put away, sawdust was swept up, and before Kris was back with six little lobsters (but for the price of five, thanks to the compassion of the seafood guy at Shaw’s), her potting bench was finished.  That’s right, from plan to execution to completion in a single day.  It is not often that Good Enough Construction hits a time deadline, so there was plenty of reason for celebration that day! 

Now, the pine bathroom vanity (come on, it was just two slabs of wood), finally looks like it fits in!  The hole for the sink serves as a sink of potting soil, and the shelves provide some organization for the garden implements and supplies.  Our corner of the world is in massive need of organization.  I am in the process of sorting all of our tools and building supplies.  It is a scary process that has completely taken over our garage.  Each project I tackle, I find myself wishing the tools and supplies had specific homes.  They do not, they are invariably hard to find, and in the end everything ends up on the workbench in the garage (the concrete counter constructed more than ten years ago in this very blog).  When I begin on a new project, I have no time for reorganizing tools before starting, and so the cycle continues and the chaos spirals further and further into absurdity.  No longer.  The potting bench is the final crack in the dam holding back the flood of organization.  Ooh, that is a rough analogy.  Sorry.  But once the gardening category moves, other things can begin to follow.  It is like those crappy plastic puzzles that had one piece missing and you had slide all the other pieces around to make the picture.  I believe those went extinct with smartphones.  In fact, I believe there are puzzle apps that recreate the puzzles without the cheap plastic. 

My rambling alarm just went off.  I apologize.  So here is the one-day project that will begin the full reorganization of all our things!  Also, don’t get used to one-day projects.  With my limited abilities of focus, they are rare.  Maybe in the next episode, we will take a look into the first half of that bathroom renovation.  Sneak preview:  we have not installed a toilet paper holder yet and are grabbing it like heathens from on top of the new marble vanity counter!  Thanks for hanging out.