The Further Adventures of Heidi and Wendy

Final Chapter - Everything Else

I'm out of steam, and really we didn't have too many adventures in the second half of Heidi's visit. And the bathroom renovations aren't really complete, but may not be for a good while! So this is the abbreviated conclusion:

I didn't think to take any pictures of Thanksgiving this year, but we had our normal spread that we feasted upon while watching the football games as usual. Mostly, I was just glad that Heidi got to stay long enough to fulfill our tradition. It will be weird sometime soon when I'm no longer in Tulsa and we don't do our Thanksgiving thing.

Everything turned out really great this year - the turkey was delicious, the stuffing turned out reasonably well, the rolls rose like crazy and were out of this world, and we had really yummy pumpkin roll for dessert. And we had plenty of leftovers for the following week!

The one thing I knew I had to get done with the bathroom before Heidi left was to get the toilet and vanity/countertop in place, because that part required a second body to move stuff around. Funny enough, the hardest thing was probably dealing with the baseboards. We had to pull the old ones out (since the vanity has a different footprint and it wouldn't sit up against the wall properly with the baseboard in the way). That's harder than it seems like it should be! Heidi worked on that, while I worked on cutting down the baseboard to cover the gaps between wall and floor underneath the vanity, since the new one sits up off the floor. This is when I sustained my only injury (so far) of the project, when I tried to cut my finger off while sawing. Fortunately, I'm incompetent enough that I couldn't even do that successfully! And for some reason, neither of us could get the flipping nail to go through the baseboard, no matter how much we hammered, in one particular spot, but eventually we drilled a pilot hole through and solved that issue (only after an awful lot of pounding, though - the other spots went through fine, so I don't know what the problem was in that one place).


Getting the vanity in place was no problem once the baseboard issue was solved. Re-installing the toilet went pretty smoothly, too - we had some trouble trying to get the toilet to line up and drop in place over the bolts, which kept wanting to fall over sideways, and we had one major leak where we had to take the tank back off and retighten all the bolts. But this toilet operation went much more smoothly than last years!

Getting the countertop in was a bit more of an adventure. We had sporadic trouble attaching the faucet - most of the directions were totally clear, but every once in a while they'd leave out a little detail that we'd have to figure out through trial and error. And then it was just loads of fun lifting that counter with the plumbing hanging off the bottom over the edge of the vanity and dropping it into place - this was where Heidi sustained her injury (I think only one?) of a squished finger. We weren't able to hook up all the plumbing underneath, as I had yet once again managed to come home from Home Depot with the wrong size of something, but at least it looks beautiful from the outside!

So still to be done - I need to get new baseboards and get those installed. I haven't found my bedroom underneath all the boxes and trash from the new stuff, either. I did get the proper waterline hookups and have installed those. The water runs, everything works great - except the drain still isn't hooked up. I used a bucket to test the water connections, but I somehow don't think I can get away with that permanently? Anyway, the problem is that this vanity is wider, so the sink is now 3 inches further away and the p-trap no longer matches up. I think I've figured out what the solution is now (with much help from Home Depot), but I had to put that on hold till I got through finals. And I got the wall fixed from the glued on mirror pretty decently, but still need to get a new mirror - I kind of want to order the one that matches my vanity, but it's $150 so I thought I ought to look around at some other alternatives first. Hopefully I'll have it all wrapped up before Christmas - but then again, today is the first official day of the holiday break and I don't feel like doing anything productive whatsoever!

Epilogue - We had a really fun visit. For the most part we got along, although by the end we were both having dreams where the other person was acting completely unreasonable, so maybe we were just repressing irritation or something psycho-babbly like that? (In my dream, Heidi insisted we had to drive all the way into Tulsa to Michael's right away because she was bored and needed a new project to work on, and in Heidi's dream I agreed to go on like a 10 mile hike through the wilderness, then quit after a mile and demanded that Heidi find a bus to drive down the trail and pick me up.) The primary and young women both miss Heidi - she got drafted into doing singing time in primary. Apparently you can't spend 6 weeks in my ward without getting a calling of some sort! And it is really quiet around here, which is strange because she really doesn't make much noise at all.