The Magic of Doing Things

When I bought my house in Year of Our Lord XXIBKBHEIV, some ten years ago, back before they invented cell phones and we were still wearing crop tops to our weddings, I was grateful my old home didn't need a major overhaul.

You see, although I look like a Manly Man GRUNT GRUNT who can and does build carburetors and knows what carburetors are, I am not versed in the art of Fixing Things. When I signed the four hundred page document that I (lawyer) absolutely did not read, binding myself and all who know me to forever protect this house and God's land on which it sits, no one stopped to ask me whether I owned a hammer first.

No, I was not given one single entry level exam to first test whether I knew how to change a furnace filter or understood how to shut off the power and that you really should do that before you change a light fixture in your house.

The closest I came to a crash course on any of this resulted from the nice man at Chase Bank who pledged to let me let Chase buy this home and charge me an absurd amount of money to live here and pretend I own it. He dropped a basic tool kit off on my front porch, which I discovered when I first arrived to the property after having been handed a key.

I looked at the tools in this kit for one hour, trying to identify any of them beyond the screwdriver. I could have called and asked him for a cheat sheet or something, but this man had a combover and he fully tripped when standing up to greet me the first time I met him so I'm guessing he didn't know much more than I did.

So, yes. It was important for me to have purchased a house that didn't need any immediate care. This allowed me to move in the shit I had transported across several countries and apartments, much of which had been inherited from roommates who abruptly abandoned me for marriage and didn't need the mismatched flatware or dented pans because the friends of the parents of their 18-year-old bride would surely buy them new supplies.

The only true exception when it came to not needing to remodel any part of my home was the main bathroom. While the remaining rooms were in fine shape, but for a tweak here and there, the bathroom appeared from the beginning to be the victim of a 2001 $9 budget trip to the most picked-over Home Depot in America by someone who was colorblind and hated me.

I've always despised this bathroom. The walls were essentially yellow. And not a nice yellow, like urine from a hydrated hot person. More like a McDonald's in 1983 that hadn't been cleaned in a while. The light fixtures included one boob light that wasn't even remotely centered on the ceiling (don't boobs come in twos or at least threes?) and some dusty dangly horrid contraption that flickered whenever you pooped.

The shower curtain was hung around five feet, which meant if anyone took a shower, the whole house took a shower. The curtain was secured to the walls by the Sword of Excalibur, so it could only be adjusted with the blessing of God upon a pure and anointed child.

The list goes on and on. But I have to stop there because I operate by a strict word count on this Academy Award Winning Website, which word count was imposed on me by my own laziness.

Although I had amassed a collection of handy friends whom I had learned to manipulate, I never did any work on this bathroom, convinced I would one day gut the whole thing, rearrange the setup in way that would defy the laws of physics and even some of the dormant Old Testament commandments, and build it out exactly how I wanted. Each year I would wander to this bathroom and declare my intentions to finally "get to that remodel!"

And then I'd do nothing.

Last September the Angel Gaybriel deposited a human baby into our home and it was around this time I learned that children are the death of dreams. That was because I no longer even had it in me to pretend I was going to ever live through a months-long bathroom remodel that would eviscerate the savings account I had built to send you all on an economy bus tour to religious sites together.

The gut and remodel was never going to happen.

I accepted that I would, forevermore, have a bathroom I hated.

Then, suddenly, not three weeks ago, the same thing that happened to Albert Einstein when he discovered the Theory of Relativity happened to me. I haven't been to church since the Irish Potato Famine, but I'm pretty sure what occurred was a revelation and I might now be a prophet on the verge of leading a cult into a volcano.

An epiphany informed me that there was something between a full remodel and doing nothing at all.

Yes, I could simply Do Updates.

Now, you, worshippers of me and everything I've ever done and will ever do, might be surprised that I, Exceptionally Intelligent Man, took a full decade to discover that not every action has to be Every Action. I am equally surprised.

But it just never occurred to me that I could, for example, simply replace the light fixtures. Or paint a wall.

But once the thought entered my mind, the thought transformed into an obsession.

The first object of business was to convince Skylar it was a good idea to paint the ceiling black. I ambushed him with this plan when he was sleep-deprived and washing baby shit off his hands after a blowout I absolutely did not help him with.

He gave me tacit sign-off to do whatever I wanted.

Over the next three days, Youtube taught me to patch holes in walls left from damage that's too boring to explain. Then I ripped the giant mirror off the wall, which had been secured by demons and curses. I painted the walls a soft white and the ceiling a stark black. I hung a new asymmetrical mirror under the theory that no one would know if it wasn't hung straight.

I replaced the shower rod and other hardware with brass, and hung the curtain at over seven feet so now I can be naked and afraid in the shower with full privacy.

I swapped out the light fixtures and did a mastectomy on the boob, turning it instead into two recessed lights (all light fixtures on dimmers, of course, because dim lighting is the true fountain of youth).

In the end, I think I spent under $400 and devoted less than five hours to the cause.

I was genuinely shocked when it was done. Listen. This bathroom is not going to feature on Best Bathrooms In Amerika Magazine. It's absolutely not perfect. But considering the low amount of effort and cost, I'm genuinely shocked with how it turned out and how much it really does feel like a new bathroom.

Here's a shitty before picture: