The Renovation Diaries Weeks 5-7: Tubthumping

This is part five of The Renovation Diaries, a week-by-week chronicle of Western Living‘s editor-at-large as she tackles a fixer-upper. To catch up on past Reno Diaries, click here.

It’s plumbing day! It’s plumbing day! It feels like Christmas, except Santa is arriving in a tub, not a sleigh, and the presents are also the tub.

This also is like Christmas in the sense that I have to have a lot of faith. I’m not going to be on site personally to witness the arrival and installation of the tub, but I have to believe everything will come through as planned or I will drown myself in the next tub that I do have access to.

Though I won’t be getting hands-on with this particular stage of the renovation, I do feel like I’ve played my part. The emotional labour of hassling the plumbing distributor for five days straight to confirm a delivery date cannot be undersold here. He may not have appreciated that I went behind his back and phoned the tub manufacturer directly, but what some call “betrayal” I call “cutting out the middle man.”

The reason I haven’t updated this riveting renovation saga for the past couple of weeks is really the tub’s fault. It’s been — appropriately enough — clogging things up. You wouldn’t expect everything to hinge on its fibreglass back, but I’m learning there’s a real cascade effect that has to happen in construction. We can’t do the floors until we do the counters, and we can’t do the counters until we finish wrapping this stupid kitchen post in stupid drywall, and we can’t wrap the stupid kitchen post in stupid drywall until the kitchen piping has run through it, and we can’t get the plumber in to do that until we also have the other things we need him to install: namely, the tub. It all leads back to tub. It’s always been tub. You had me at tub. Follow the tub. To me, you are tub.

While we’ve been waiting and waiting for the Great Tubbening, we’ve accomplished a few other things. Modern lighting has been swapped in for the cat-hair covered track lights — in my personal opinion, a vast improvement. My contractor-slash-father-in-law Paul has been doing some framing to the closet doors, and I went out with Max and my mom to prime said closets on the weekend. It was nice to have some progress, though I got more paint in my hair than on the wall and two showers later, it hasn’t come out. Do I lean into it and add more paint to achieve a cool Claire Saffitz/Stacey London/Rogue from X-Men look? These are the questions I contemplate to pass the time until Arrival of Tub.

My dream career as a shampoo model isn’t the only thing we ruined. My mom — a prolific painter of walls — has this tried-and-tested trick to avoid cleaning brushes and rollers, where you just bag them up wet and freeze them so they don’t dry between coats, and so after our closet makeover, we did just that. Unfortunately, the odour-killing paint we used to prime the closets was too powerful to be tamed, and has now infused everything in the freezer with the delicious flavour of Dulux primer fumes.

These are the expenses you don’t think about when you’re renovating: replacing your mom’s ice cream and buying wigs. Who knows what lessons I’ll learn next week? Hopefully the lesson is not “What to do when you tub doesn’t come.”

Follow along on Instagram and come back next week for more Renovation Diary updates!