This morning was an experiment. Given the varried and costly advice I've gotten on dealing with my bathroom, I decided to roll the dice and try out a company recommended by a random guy who was in the tile store when I regailed the staff. They called me to ask why I'd had an order of tiles shipped express and then not come to get them for the last three weeks.... Komfort Plumbing. They don't advertise. They've got plenty of big customers already, how did I find them, friends and family only. They said they'd do the job by the hour, two guys for $145. Since Martin was going to charge $600 for the shower situation alone, I figured I could try Komfort out for comparison at pretty low risk financially and in terms of how much damage they could inflict on bathroom. They even suggested I bust open the wall myself to save the time they'd charge me for doing it. Apparently, drywall comes down pretty easily with an exacto knife and a small crowbar. (In time we'll see about getting it back on.)
Turns out, this was a pretty precient suggestion. I thought, if they're quick, I'll get them to put in the sink too. Then it will start to look like a bathroom. Since the hack plumber had left a rough iron pipe with no threading sticking out of my wall, I broke away the wall around it to leave room to get it out and put in whatever is supposed to go in its place. I also know that a wall hung sink needs a sturdy piece of wood inside the wall to be bolted into and I wanted to see if that had made the cut. Yup, it was there, right above a piece of pipe sticking up above the trap that extended outside the wall. What's ...that? I placed a call to an interested party to document my suspicions. Moments later the plumbers arrived and immediately wanted to know who the hell did my plumbing. Did I do it? I might as well have. What that pipe is is just that, a drain pipe sitting there open right in the wall, so that when the drain pipes get clogged up the water has somewhere to go: into the wall. 
For $175, charging only for one guy by the hour ($95), I've got the water coming into my bathtub. For $6000 they'll redo all the drain lines. This was even worse than I thought, but I fear its even worse than that. I've been complaining viciously about a stench in the lower two floors of the house for the last couple of years. I chalked it up to bad catbox maintenance by my family, who own the house, but now that I think about it, its SINCE THE LAST RENOVATION by the same jackass contractor! Could it be that there are open sewer pipes breathing foul gases throughout the house?!?!!!!Lesson of the day: its actually not that the men that dominate these professions are or pass for straight that irks me. Its the ones for whom this absolutely the only qualification they have for the job. I guess its when you don't have a fucking clue what you're doing that defensive hetero-masculinity comes out of the toolbox. In fact, when I sense it now, I'm going to take it as a good reason to suspect that there's not much else in the toolbox. Moreover, it scares me. I don't like being alone in my house with strange straight men, period. But what struck me today was that when they are competent and professional, they're also more comfortable with me, less threatened by a woman with an interest and a clue, so they answer my questions and listen to my input, show me what they're doing and explain how to do other things myself. This not only is good for my house but I feel safer, which is even more important. Homoimprovement isn't just about the house itself, its about all the social interactions that it takes to turn it into "a home" in the generic sense that turns out to be the core of the heteronorm.
1 comment:
Right on. Who needs someone else's toolbox (and whatever comes with it) when you have your own? (Or tool bag, as the case may be.) I want to see the drywall demolition.
Post a Comment