So I mentioned I made a list of projects I need to finish around the house before I can put up any(more) Christmas decorations. This is the list:
• put up bedside lights in bedroom
• make pee pad pan for front bathroom
• sand & paint baseboard in front bathroom
• take all Halloween decorations to storage
• put insulating plastic on at least 6 windows
• install whale bath toy scoop
I feel like some of these need explaining: The pee pad pan & painting the baseboard are part of the same thing: back when Taylor was a single dog parent to Kichou, he worked long hours and Kichou would be at home alone so he learned to do his dog business on papers in the bathroom, a practice that continued when they moved in with me. Now he’s old and incapable of learning new tricks so he’ll still peeing on papers (or rather, pee pads) in the night. We actually got reusable, washable fabric pee pads for him to save money (and the environment) but the problem is he is a boy dog and he lifts his leg to pee every. time. So he was peeing on the baseboard and even if we sort of propped the pee pad against it, it would often fall over or slide down and as a result, the baseboard in that part of the front bathroom is STRAIGHT UP NASTY. We’ve tried cleaning it with vinegar and with bleach and it’s just beyond cleaning and as a result the room smells not great. We got some Kilz stain/odour sealing primer to use when we repaint it, but I was like “what is the point of repainting this when it’s just gonna get peed on again?” We needed some kinda litter tray to put the pee pad in to keep the pee area away from the baseboard but like… that is not a thing that is available commercially. Kichou won’t go in something that he has to jump into, so a regular, cat-style litterbox is out of the question, and while they do make 2-sided triangular corner litter trays for bunnies and ferrets, they aren’t big enough for a dog. SO HERE’S WHAT I DID: I bought a medium large Sterilite storage bin and I hacked it up with a saw. Those things are a lot harder to cut that you think they’ll be, but I had this little handsaw that did a pretty decent job. I cut off two sides so it’s still rectangular, and the sides are higher than the baseboard and higher than such a little dog can pee. It needs a little work still, I want to cut off the wide top edge so I can clip the pee pad in place, but so far it seems like it’s working and we can go ahead and sand/repaint now.
Wow, that was a lot of dog pee talk, and I apologize. That isn’t even the point of this post! The main story is the GODDAMN WHALE BATH TOY SCOOP. Gwen is a small child and has bath toys, and ever since she was little we’ve used one of those suction cup net bags to store them. The suction cups are pretty fried tho, and no longer stick to the tile. It’s also annoying fishing all her billions of toys out of the tub. I suggested to Taylor we get a scoop-style one, and a few weeks ago he ordered this Boon Whale Scoop. It’s a three-piece item: the scoop, a shelf the scoop hooks on to, and a bracket to hang the shelf on. There are two options for installing the bracket: you can either screw it into the tile OR it has adhesive tabs on the back to just stick it up. I’m not about to start drilling holes in tile so I decided to go the adhesive tab route, but I’d read some reviews that said the adhesive wasn’t great and people’s whales had noisily fallen down in the middle of the night and broken. To help it stay in place I decided to reinforce the adhesive tabs with some Sugru (an amazing product which I love); I had one pack of it left over from a different project.
It wasn’t just as simple as sticking the whale on the wall though; I had to clean the tiles thoroughly, then clean them again with rubbing alcohol, and after sticking the bracket up I wasn’t supposed to let it get wet for 24 hours so the adhesive could cure. Not so easy in a house full of people having showers all the time, but on Monday evening I was finally able to berate Symphony and Taylor to both have their showers early so I could get it done. So I was all ready to clean the wall when I realized… I’d put the box with the whale scoop in Gwen’s bedroom closet, and she was already asleep. There was no way I was going to risk waking her up so I resigned myself to having to wait another day when Mark Fluffalo, doing his Scary Cat Abandoned Psychiatric Hospital routine, jumped out and scared Sym in the hallway. She screamed right outside Gwen’s door, waking her up. I was able to soothe her back to sleep fairly quickly, and also get the whale out of the closet! I went ahead and cleaned the tile, applied all the extra adhesive, and stuck the bracket to the wall.
24 hours later the adhesive was finally cured and I went to hang the shelf on the bracket, but I couldn’t get it to fit. I was trying so hard to jam the dang thing over the bracket and suddenly I was like… wait a minute, and tried putting the shelf on the bottom of the bracket, where it fit perfectly, because I’d stuck the bracket to the wall upside down. ALL THAT FRICKIN HASSLE AND I PUT IT THE WRONG WAY UP LIKE R U KIDDING ME??? I had to pry it off the wall with a butter knife which took FOREVER because of all the extra adhesive, and now guess what? I don’t have anymore adhesive to put it back up with! I had to order more and now I’m waiting for it to arrive so I can try again, and in the meantime I still have to clean all the old adhesive bits off the tile. RIDICULOUS and FRUSTRATING as I’d crossed this item off my list and I had to UNcross it.
I do have one super success story though: yesterday I put that not-at-all-tacky shrink-fit insulating plastic on more than six windows. I actually had this up before but the property manager made me take it down because he said it could “damage the paint” on the window frames. In my opinion it’s a lot more damaging to have the painted window frames constantly wet from condensation and growing a gross biofilm all over them, and if they didn’t want the frames damaged MAYBE they should have sprung for double-paned windows instead of these cheap single panes BUT WHAT DO I KNOW. He actually sent me a registered letter with a list of suggestions on how to avoid window condensation (which he came in person to tell me he’d sent because the property management office is like 50 feet from my door?) and they were all total nonsense, like “turn on the heat lamp in your bathroom” when I don’t have a heat lamp in my bathroom, “open the window in your bathroom” when I don’t have a window in my bathroom, and “leave a window open in every room all the time day and night all winter long” when I’m not looking to freeze and also I live in a basement apartment and I’m not looking to get home invaded, raped and murdered either. Weird how a guy who lives in a big house in the suburbs and drives a Mercedes has NO IDEA what it’s like living in my rickety basement apartment, but ANYWAY, I had to take all the plastic down. So annoying and I had to spend a significant portion of last winter drying off all my windows multiple times a day. HOWEVER I recently learned that he quit or got fired or idek, but who cares HE’S GONE and I’ve insulated (most of) my windows again.
