The Renovation

A few months ago we noticed some water damage on our bathroom ceiling. More specifically, one night we noticed that our overhead light had water pouring out of it. Our Amazing Super (more on him later) checked on the apartment upstairs, verified a leak and fixed it, but our ceiling was water damaged.

The water trickled down far enough so that it also damaged our medicine cabinet; the shelves started to buckle and the plastic pins that keep them up started to fall out. In typical fashion I, feeling stressed out and helpless about this situation, jammed our medicine cabinet items into the shelves in such a way that they held up and I didn't have to deal. One day I felt a cold coming on, and Co trotted off to get me the Zi.cam. I heard a crash, and she came back with a perplexed look and commented, "I didn't realize the Zi.cam was holding together our entire medicine cabinet." It's a tall box, you see, and so rarely used...

Another issue in our bathroom was our bathtub faucet. We had two separate knobs, one for hot and one for cold, and the hot one leaked. The water was really hot, and the knob itself would be hot to the touch after use. Pain in the butt, but now with the baby, really dangerous.

I have always approached home repair with a kind of learned helplessness. Medicine cabinet broken? Oh well, have to use the zi.cam to prop it up. Faucet burns you? Oh well, better jump out of the way. It honestly never occurs to me that problems like this can be changed by doing anything less drastic than moving. I'm not sure why; my parents did some renovation on at least one of the houses we lived in. They redid our kitchen, doing things like adding a window over the sink. See, this would never occur to me. I'd be like, huh, I want a window over the sink, better find a house that has one.

Back to our story: Amazing Super told us that he would come fix the ceiling damage. We live in a co-op so we were worried we'd have to pay, being Owners and all, but he always does as much as he can on the co-op's dime (hey, what else is maintenance for?). When he saw the medicine cabinet he said he'd also get the co-op to buy us a new one (since the water damage ruined it and the plumbing problem was in the walls, not our apartment. I am all for semantics).

Co asked him about our faucet problem and he said, no problem, he could replace it. In fact, our two-knob faucet was illegal. Who knew?? (He charged us very, very kindly.)

So there you have it. Our big renovation. From this:


To this:


It's a milestone.