I Accomplished Something!

Okay, so the first thing was to get the sturdy step-stool that was one of three or four things we kept out of the houseload of crap that was included in the purchase of the AssVac.

It's very sturdy. I usually keep it in my closet for stepping up and getting sweaters off the top shelf. But I am barely not-broken right now. I certainly don't need to go balancing on ladders or bathtub-edges, wrenching something and breaking myself all over again. Or do I? There is a little pumpkin bread left and I think maybe a Dirty Jobs marathon coming up this weekend...

No, I was good. I used the step stool. Only to discover that it wasn't tall enough.

Precarious-looking, no? I had better take my socks off. Putting on shoes might have been a better idea, but it was early. And when I say early, I mean like 6:30 am -- not pre-dawn or anything. Note the actual sunlight outside the window.

The first thing I learned was that it's nice when you don't give a hoo about the old fixtures and you can just wrench them around, bend them every which-a-way so as to get at the screws with the cordless.

The second thing I learned is that, when the screws are a hundred years old and covered with a hundred years of coats of paint, you can't get purchase on them with the cordless and you risk making a right bollocks of Johnny's paint job. Actually, this I knew already, but it's been a while since I accomplished anything around here; I guess I just forgot.

So you get your girlie screwdriver:

I'm so glad I waited a whole day to charge the power drill. Ah well. Look how sparkly the tiles are.

This next one was hung up by one screw and one nail. No matter what which-a-way I wrenched it, that nail would not come out.

So I had to go down cellar for a hammer. And now my feet look like this.

(That's the still-slightly-injured one, and she's still-slightly-swollen, so forgive her if she looks a bit clod-hopper-ish. My other foot, a dainty size 5, trips around in Cinderella-slippers. I just chose to show you this one because I know you've been dying for photographic evidence of my big whiny boo-boo.)

When I came back up with the hammer, look what I saw:

A perfectly good hammer, stashed in the scary cubby under the stairs. I mean, it's not a perfectly good hammer. It's actually a perfectly useless hammer for actually hammering things. But for pulling nails, in my experience, even ass hammers will do the job. That's why I'm using this one.

It's not ass -- it is, in fact, the second-best hammer in the house. I chose not to go with the roofing hammer (The Best Hammer Not Only In The House But In The Entire Universe) because it's awfully big and powerful, and I didn't want to slip and make a balls of Johnny's paint job.

Whoops.

That top mess was more or less unavoidable. That's where the hundred-year-old paint came away with the hardware. But that ding down at the bottom? That's where I slipped.

In here comes a paragraph without pictures because there was a lot of sweating and swearing involved and damned if I was going to interrupt myself to line up a stupid shot. Here's what:

I decided I wasn't going to use the drill and anchors, because it's going directly into wood, not plasterboard, and it's only holding a shower curtain so there's no weight on it and anyway who cares? Except the screws wouldn't go in to the hundred-year-old wood, and the power drill kept slipping off of them, so I used the girlie screwdriver for about ten minutes -- until the first screw (out of four) got halfway in and stuck. I got it out, then I had to go back downstairs for the drill bits, then I drilled two holes that didn't quite line up with the screw-holes in the hardware, but what the hell. One of the two hardwares are up:

It's straight. Sure it's straight.

Conveniently, the nail-hole on the other side lined up perfectly with where one of the screw-holes were going to go, so I only had to drill one hole there. Except the nail hole wasn't big enough to take the screw, and I didn't figure that out until I'd already put the other screw all the way in, so I had to remove that one and drill a second hole and then, finally, both hardwares were up.

It's straight. Sure, it's straight.

And ta da!

Should I get black rings for that back one, too, or is it bordello-y enough the way it is?

I put the ladder back where I found it, but the rest of the tools I shoved guess where:

Scary cubby under the stairs with the other, assy hammer. Oh, except for Girlie Screwdriver.

She goes back in the bedside table drawer that she came out of.

And I don't want to hear Word One about the condition of that bedside table drawer.