Interesting. I've said I'm getting too old to renovate houses, but I don't know. While I've been stressed out and miserable of late, I decided rather than work on my bookkeeping some more, I would run down to the house and do the last cleaning on the last bedroom. (I cleaned the whole house with TSP/Bleach/Water and now I'm going through a second time with Pine-Sol/Vinegar/Water.) Still have the rest of the house to do, but we'll say we're maybe 30% done with cleaning. I think it will work--although there was still more of a smoker smell than I'd expected when I showed up, and I'm definitely going ahead with priming with KILZ before painting.
But I'm rambling. The point is, cleaning the bedroom went well and was fairly quick. I had a little time for something else. This is a dangerous thing for me, because it's easy to plan to stay another 15 minutes and wind up staying another 2 hours--as I did again tonight. Had on relatively nice jeans when I cleaned the living room. Since there was dirty bleach water everywhere, I opted to skip crawling around, pulling up carpet staples until a later time, when the floor was dry. Was set to do that tonight. But then I realized I'd probably be cleaning bathrooms next and I had some minor(?) demo work to do in the full bath.
At one point, the tub had ... No, wait, I'm still getting ahead of myself. The tub, when I bought the place, appeared to be in decent shape--something I keep an eye on after repeated failures at restoring an old worn out tub in the first rental. It did have some kind of odd putty job around the overflow drain, but I wasn't terribly worried about it. Or the red stain in much of the bottom of the tub. Tried the red stain a few days ago. Thought it would come up with a bit of scrubbing. No. Got some CLR and more abrasive substances for the next attempt, but for now I've held off on that. Well I decided before pulling staples, to get the putty knife and scrape away some of the weirdness around the overflow drain on the tub. Somehow, today it came up really easy. And I learned that the reason for the putty is that about an 8" circle around the overflow drain is totally rusted away. Seriously. How does this fucking happen? I don't understand it. So I'm contemplating BathFitter or some other tub liner--or patching the tub with fiberglass. It should actually work pret--yeah, I'm not going to finish that sentence out loud and fucking jinx myself.
So with that settled, I realized the next thing I'd be cleaning was the bathrooms. Now the full bath had a shower door at one point. That's not a big deal. What is a big deal is, for whatever reason, at some point someone decided to run a partial wall across the ceiling over the tub edge to meet up with the shower door. Bad idea. Makes a small bathroom look smaller. Demo could be a pain, but I decided it HAD to be done. So I took a shot at it. I'd already smashed a small hole in the drywall with a wrecking bar as a preliminary investigation. I opened that up with my drywall saw to get a better idea what I was dealing with. Yeah. No, this was no impulse project. This was probably done when the place was built and was very well executed. Steel (aluminum?) studs, screwed to the walls, ceilings, drywall, and each other. Not the quick project I'd hoped for. In the end, I wound up having to completely dismantle the entire bastard, piece by piece. And that's when I found out the bits joining it to the walls were glued in place with construction adhesive. Actually some top notch craftsmanship. Getting it apart was so much work that I might have just left it if I hadn't already fucked it up enough that repairing it would be about as much work. When I got it out, I approved. Makes the bathroom look twice as big.
The point of all this is that none of these surprises worried me or freaked me out. I looked at them the way 30 year old me would've: "Huh. Didn't expect that. Oh well, I'll just have to adjust the plan." It was actually almost fun.
This is a long way of saying maybe I need to do more renovation work and less brain work. Because after getting my Facebook hacked, getting an email from a store I didn't remember buying anything from, asking me to take a survey, filled me with paranoid dread--even though I'm certain(?) any credit cards involved in my Facebook profile have long since expired. Meanwhile, huge problems with my bathroom were met with almoste pleasure: "Ah, this is the unexpected expense that I've been waiting to see pop up." I maintain that you just need to stick about $8K in our budget for the left field unexpected expense that you never saw coming.
Well, I should get going. Tomorrow's another day. And I have to work. And my dog seems to have an ear infection, so I need to touch base with the vet. And I've still got deferred bookkeeping I need to bang out. Oh, and working out on the USAA phone monkeys. Because I really fucking hate this company and really really want to end my relationship with them ASAP and I can't do that until I can get the March 3 claim to show up as "closed." Now you'd think that would be simple. Make a phone call. "Hello? Yeah, that property claim? I don't need any more money and the work was actually completed over a month ago. Just go ahead and close it out." Easy-peasy. But you are not a 2023 USAA customer. Simple things involve tortuous odysseys. I've had 3 people tell me the claim is closed. I even have a screencap from the message board. But apparently the claim shows as still open in whatever database insurance companies use--which prevents me from getting a new insurer. Yesterday me and my new agent did a conference call with USAA, asking for a letter stating the claim was closed. They agreed to this and sent a letter that said they are my insurer and they've paid out $X on my claim. Fuck you very much. Thanks for giving me something that doesn't at all say what I asked for it to say. So now I have to--ONCE AGAIN--figure out what magic words I have to say to get someone at shitty, shitty USAA to do what they've said they did 6 weeks ago.