Category Archives: The Colonel’s Plan

The Colonel’s Plan – All Work and No Play

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October 2, 2017

Dear Daddy—

The new grout worked a lot better. The shower is almost finished as of tonight. I expect to finish the sink base this week and be ready for the plumber to come back. Coincidentally, the kitchen, which I have not been talking about thus far, should also be ready for the plumbers next week. The countertops are supposed to be in on Wednesday.

The kitchen, prior to the installation of all cabinets and a floor. Note the sink upside down on the counter. The installers decided to remove the disposal, and thus destroyed it and had to buy us a new one. This is a cleaned-up version of what the kitchen looked like for 50 years.

But I’m growing weary of talking about the bathroom, as I grow weary of working sometimes. My days, of late, feel endless, and, contrarily, fly by so fast that I hardly notice them. There’s just so much to do. I guess I’ve become a lot like you—always working, coming home from my job with a long list of things I need to get done and diving into them. Those things I need to get done include writing these letters, which I’m doing now even as I sit watching Marvel’s Inhumans with Renee, Ethan and Jessica. I also just invoiced a client and paid bills.

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The Colonel’s Plan – Grout

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September 28, 2017

Dear Daddy—

I hate GROUT!!!!!!!

Well, I hate the grout I bought last week. I was going to use the grout you left me. It’s been sitting, under a table in Susan’s general purpose room, for almost 50 years now. But when I looked at all those bags, with the pretty pictures of Medusa on them, labeled “GROUT” in big letters, it turned out they weren’t actually grout. Not sure what that’s about, but, when you read the fine print, it says they’re thinset mortar for laying tile. So, while it’s clever and all that you would name a product that turns to stone “Medusa,” it’s not very useful.

The stuff I bought said it was ideal for tile up to 8″ x 8″, and for any applications where the spacing is between 1/8″ and 1/2″. And it said it was ideal for wet areas like shower walls, although not for saunas. Okay, my tiles are 4″ x 4″, my spacing is 1/8″ and they’re shower walls, not saunas.

But this stuff is awful!

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The Colonel’s Plan – The Blue Bathroom – Part 7

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September 26, 2017

Dear Daddy–

The shower stall is now almost completely tiled. Shopping for waterproofing compound, I found this amazing product called SimpleMat. It’s basically a giant roll of double-sided tape. You stick it on the surface to be tiled, peel off the backing paper, and press the tile into it. No mixing adhesive, no glue all over your fingers, shoes, floor and tile, no cleanup, and no waiting for the mortar to cure before you grout.

Of course, with my work-time largely cut up into chunks of a few hours here and there, the odds of me laying tile and grouting it the same day are very, very slim. Still, the savings in cleanup alone were worth the cost of the product.

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The Colonel’s Plan – The Blue Bathroom, Part 6

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September 26, 2017

Dear Daddy—

Now that I had found all the tile I needed, it was time to lay it out. I didn’t want to screw up, so I wanted to sketch it all out. I started by marking and measuring the pieces that were going to go up the wall on the edge of the shower.

What were you planning for the corner at the base, since the baseboard tiles don’t have corner pieces and don’t corner together well? In the one bathroom you finished, corners are formed with special corner pieces, but I don’t have any in blue. And no, I don’t think there are any stragglers left hiding. Big as this house is, I think I have the inventory under control now.

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The Colonel’s Plan – The Blue Bathroom – Part 5

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September 22, 2017

Dear Daddy –

The bathroom is a big project. Its floor is down. Its outlets are partially wired. I furred out (is that the right spelling?) the opening above the now-installed shower walls, so that backing board for the tile would both fasten to the studs and slip down over the lip at the top of the fiberglass walls. How does one make furring strips—pieces of wood that are used to fill what would otherwise be a gap between a finished surface and the rough wall? You had obviously made a bunch of them. I wound up making more out of scraps of paneling you’d saved for years, left over from finishing your library and our family room. Continue reading →

The Colonel’s Plan – The Blue Bathroom – Part 4

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September 15, 2017 (Continued)

Dear Daddy,

So the guy at Kendall’s told me that no hardware store could rip tile, and I’d need to spend $25 – $50 to get one tile ripped by a home contractor.

I believed him, but I was headed to Catonsville later anyway, to meet Ethan. You probably never knew that Ethan, Christian and I have, for years, gone to Cosmic Comix in Ellicott City, and later in Catonsville, every Wednesday. That’s the day new comics come out. You never understood my love of comic books. I remember proudly showing you a stack of seven of them that I’d bought with my allowance. “Look at all these great comics,” I said. Or I said something like that.

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The Colonel’s Plan – The Blue Bathroom – Part 3

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September 15, 2017 (Continued)

Dear Daddy,

Once Gary had the shower base and the rough plumbing in place, I started on the floor. You had bought and installed beige mosaic tile in the bathroom downstairs, the only one you finished. There was identical tile, in shades of pink, for Susan’s bathroom. I had assumed there was similar blue mosaic tile for this room, but, when I took inventory of the tile, lovingly stored these past 50 years, I didn’t have anything like that. I asked Mike if there were any code issues with Pergo or similar wood laminate. I figured it would be a pretty easy install. I actually have it in my bathroom at home, but we don’t have a shower in that one. He said no code issues, but don’t do that to myself. Ceramic was the way to go, and wood-look plank ceramic is the in thing.

So I bought 50 square feet of the stuff—no more expensive than Pergo. I had done a tile floor before, you might remember, at my old townhouse. It wasn’t horrible. The only downside was the mess the mortar makes, and then the grout. And they still make a mess. After finishing the cement, when I went out in the yard to hose down my tools, I wound up just hosing down myself in my shorts. It was fortunately still very hot outside, even if you would have been running around in a flannel shirt and t-shirt. I never understood how you could stand that, just as you never understood how I could run around without a shirt on. I guess we adjust our bodies to certain temperatures by wearing more or less clothing.

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The Colonel’s Plan – The Blue Bathroom – Part 2

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September 15, 2017 (Continued)

Dear Daddy –

Let’s talk about the shower…

I hired Mike the plumber (and his son Gary, and his grandson Cody) on the recommendation of a friend. I knew that finishing the plumbing for three bathrooms and the kitchen was going to be too much for me. It turned out to be the biggest expense associated with the house so far, but it was worth it.

So the first thing Mike the plumber told me about the shower cubicle was that it had to go. It was designed for the plumbing codes of decades ago, and he really recommended I use a pre-fab, fiberglass cubicle. That would be fastened right to the studs, not to the plywood. Now I didn’t see any reason the plywood couldn’t be there in between. But once I had measured the available cubicle base and walls, I realized that I needed the combined inch of width that removing the plywood would provide. So out it was going to come, and it needed to go before Mike and his crew could even do the rough-in plumbing. Continue reading →

The Colonel’s Plan – The Blue Bathroom – Part 1

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September 15, 2017

Dear Daddy –

This week I’ve been coming into the home stretch on the blue bathroom—“The Boys’ Bathroom.” You designed it with a shower and two sinks, with a door that opened into Charles’s bedroom. I guess the senior brother was thought to deserve the privilege of a private entrance into the bathroom in the middle of the night, or early in the morning. My bedroom was to be around the corner. The two sinks would have allowed us to brush our teeth—or later shave—at the same time.

As with most of your plans for the house, this arrangement never came to be. The bathroom was never finished. As I write this, the toilet, sinks, plumbing fixtures and tile are still in their boxes, only recently moved out of storage in the roughed-in shower cubicle, and the back corner of the East General Purpose Room—“Susan’s General Purpose Room,” now to be Ethan and Jessica’s room. Continue reading →

The Colonel’s Plan

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Tonight begins the first calendar year I’ve spent without my father. It seems appropriate, then, to begin sharing the several dozen letters I’ve written him since he left us. They’re all about the same thing–the completion of the house he designed, and partially built, starting back in 1967. He lived in it, unfinished, for 49 and a half years. Now it’s being finished, so I’m telling him about that process. Along the way, I’ll tell you about the house, the man that built it, the family that lived in it. I plan to share these letters weekly. I hope you all enjoy the tour. 

September 14, 2017

Dear Daddy—

You died on May 6th. It was in the afternoon. You had gone to sleep on Thursday, and not really woken up after that. We sat with you and held your hand and talked to you, and then you just left us.

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