WWTBAM Bored

to replace the bathroom floor the plumber ripped up looking for the trap. After plumber found the trap they said "that wasn't the cause of the water backing up into your tub & not going down". (After 3rd trip to apt to fix plumbing problems, on which they found a big rock in my shower head, they said "I guess the city is blowing water (& gravel! which they had found earlier, & blamed on the cat, though it wasn't clay litter) backwards up your system after all". (City had been doing water main work locally but swore up & down they hadn't been blowing water backwards. For whatever that was worth.)

I am really bummed, because hollering & screaming of housemate-who-won't-move-yet was what tipped the balance to having floor ripped up instead of just waiting to see if awful backward-water thing ever happenned again.

The good part is that the drains drain really fast now (& probably will for a little while). The bad part is that the nice 50s two-tone gray linoleum is being replaced by stuff I do not get to choose, being a renter. I was all psyched to at least get a color choice (mine would definitely be something sagey-green with an inoffensive pattern) when my landlord said "I do not allow color; you get the brownish white (hey! brown's a color!) or the grayish white". I go for the grayish white. Which I have not yet seen. If it at all resembles the very white white of my downstair neighbor's bathroom, the best I can say for it is "antiseptic-looking". I will find out tomorrow.

Not being allowed to choose sucks. I guess it goes along with "not having to pay for it", but I do get to do that every time the rent is raised, anyway.

How about getting a bathmat (in the color of your choice) to distract from the antiseptic floor?

I sympathize. I dislike all my floors, which seem to date back to 1970 and look it.

I had a great bathmat, in the right green with pink & yellow light stripes. Evil leaving-so-slowly-I-can-see-no-sign-of-packing-in-4-months housemate trashed it early in their tenure. They trashed a lot of stuff early in their tenure, but never all at once or as obviously as the final straw stuff that happenned 4 months ago. That, & not paying anything toward the rent (notice I say "toward", not "the rent"; the balance is a big, big bill however you slice it) since February is why they are supposed to be gone (as in "begone!").

I useta love most of my floors. Now 1 has been trashed by a series of housemates (but would be fixable with sander I hope), 1 has been trashed by current housemate, who ripped up various pieces of the linoleum in the kitchen "because I walk on it with bare feet & it hurt them" (ever heard of shoes? ever heard of "its not yours, so don't trash it"?; apparently, never) & one is this bathroom floor.

Newest news is that floor-fixer-person says landlord told them to try to match the two tones of gray linoleum tile after all. I will be very happy if they can. The alternative is having an odd-looking rectangle in a diff shade of gray covering the ripped-up section; I would actually like that better than the "whole new floor in old bathroom" which I was originally promised, only because the "whole new floor" concept will take many more days. And "to do it right you really have to move toilet & tub". Yeah, right. To do it right all you have to do is a lot of cutting around the toilet & tub, but that's a lot of work too. Not to mention money.

The problem is that my landlord gets into apoplexy about the expense of the "whole new bathroom" with more-modern shower, etc etc, even though that's their redecorating idea, & none of my own. Which involves removing my hall closet to buy about 2 x 3 feet more of bathroom space. I would rather have the closet, & to have a working bathroom, & not to live with months of work & a higher rent bill. So I try to gently steer them away when they get into that.


What I really want, & the landlord knows it because I mention it frequently, is all new windows that I can actually see out of, which pop out easily to clean (I've seen this demoed in real life) when they get so you can't see out of them, & which have built-in storm-window function. This is not really that expensive, even for an apartment with about 17 windows. Around $7,000.00. Way less than a rebuilt bathroom. But it is not on the table, though unnecessary bathroom overhauls occasionally are.