So, the big bathroom project weekend has been and gone and didn’t go exactly as planned. Shockingly little actual bathroom work was done, mostly due to the near-continual rain, but a lot of other projects got finished. Normally, rain isn’t that much of a deterrent to an indoor remodeling project, but I’ve got the drywall and everything stored out in the garage. It was so absolutely disgusting on Friday that the drywall would have turned into extremely soggy wall in the few seconds it took to make the trip from the garage to the house.
Instead, Friday was garage day. Sheltered by the roof, with the door open to watch the rain hiss down outside, I went to work tearing down a winter’s worth of accumulated cardboard boxes and detritus, then I got to work on assembling the gas grill that my wife and I got as a wedding shower present last year now that it’s finally coming up on good enough weather to make use of it.
I got it out of the big box it came in, did the obvious assembly of things like the grill surface and the drip shields, and worked my way through the boxes with the side-wing shelves and burner parts in search of the assembly instruction book. And it wasn’t there. Faced with the prospect of using a blister-pack of screws and washers with no clues as to where in the grill they’re supposed to go, I decided that discretion was the better part of experimentation and gave the company a call on the handy ‘800’ number printed on the box. The Florida based company representative was kind of surprised that I’d waited this long to assemble a grill that I’d gotten last year, until I told her that I was in Michigan. Long story short, an assembly manual and care guide should be arriving sometime this week.
With that hurdle crossed, and the rain still pouring down outside, I decided to tackle the prospect of installing a new garage door opener. Opening this box revealed the instruction manual prominently displayed, and the first instructions were to remove any existing opening system. This struck me as a good idea, so I shut the outside door and set to work. All told it took about half an hour to remove the old system, but I did manage to rip a nice chunk out of the back of one finger doing so. After bandaging myself up and reading the rest of the installation manual, I sat back and said those four little words that keep the economy flowing: “I’m calling a professional.” They’ll be out to install it this Friday, which hopefully gives enough time to get the truck cap out of the way.