Two more things for which I'm thankful

Here at Casa la Brilliant, we have very, very hard water. This fact, combined with the unfortunate reality that our downstairs bathtub is American Standard Ming Green and our upstairs is avocado green, means that our tubs tend to look like crap, because who wants to scrub something that hideous?

That's not to say I haven't tried, because I have. I tried every product known to man -- I tried CLR. I tried steam. I tried lemon juice-soaked paper towels. I tried vinegar-soaked paper towels. I tried baking soda paste. I tried Kaboom and Bam Lime-Away and all kinds of other highly nasty cleaners -- all to no avail.

I read on a messageboard a few weeks ago that some people people have had success with Bon Ami Cleanser, and others with Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. So since I had a few days off, and walking past the upstairs bathroom in broad daylight made me realize just what a horrorshow it was, I decided to try both. First I put the Bon Ami on one of those scrubby sponges and scrubbed, then rinsed. Then I went over it with the Magic Eraser. And damn if that old ugly olive green tub didn't start to shine! I'm not going to say it looks new, but it looks like a clean bathrub is supposed to.

So then today I decided to try it on the Ming Green tub downstairs -- the one with the curved bottom that's going to kill me if I have to keep it into my old age. Now Old Ming hasn't looked quite as bad as Groovy 70's Show upstairs, but that's only because it's a lighter color. So I went to work. And damn it if Old Ming didn't start to shine too. Well, all except the giant rusting chip that I have to sand, then paint rust stopper on, then apply Porc-a-Filler and then many layers of Porc-a-Fix (which the nice man at World of Tile told me had to be done in multiple thin layers, and the fact that I didn't do that last time is why it rusted from underneath). But when Old Ming is smiling like he is today, it makes me much more inclined to fix that old war wound from probably an incident with a glass shampoo bottle in the early 1960's.

I don't know if it was the Bon Ami or the Magic Eraser (though I scrubbed both sinks with nothing but the Magic Eraser and they started to shine too), but this Product Skeptic is sold. If you have an old tub that you hate that is rotten with lime stains, try these products. You may yet rekindle the magic of your old romance with your own Mamie Pink tub.

Things I Learned While Working on a Habitat for Humanity Project

1. When laying 12" floor tile, hire a professional. There's a reason they're so expensive.

2. If you must lay 12" floor tile yourself, get a good pair of kneepads. If you're horizongally challenged like I am, make sure the straps don't cut into the back of your legs. Otherwise you'll be bent from the waist all day and your hamstrings will be wonderfully stretched, but also screaming.

3. Bill Clinton made it so that we will never again be able to say "kneepads" without thinking of Monica Lewinsky.

4. People who think you're with an all-female construction company will stop by and ask for your business card because they think you'll be honest and meticulous. Maybe we don't have to worry about layoffs after all; if the worst happens we can form an all-female construction company. Any suggestions for names? My colleagues didn't seem to be crazy about "Chicks with Dicks."

5. Put the stirrer on the drill, then put it in the bucket of water and thinset, THEN turn it on. Don't just plunge the spinning stirrer into the bucket. All hell will break loose.

6. Habitat is a really good organization that deserves everyone's support.

7. Ken Johnson of Amarillo Grilling is an awesome guy, whose business means there are TWO awesome 'cue masters in the area. (Dave Finkelstein is the other one.) If you're looking for someone to cater a party and you're within 100 miles of Oakland, NJ, give Ken a call.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere - special Wussy-Ass Democrats and Shamelessly Racist Republicans edition

Here in the Land that We Wish Irene Had Forgotten, the cleanup continues, with gawkers and scavengers haunting the neighborhoods of those still putting their ruined belongings out by the curb and the usual post-disaster scams cropping up already. Meanwhile, another storm is starting to look like it's gong to have to do a 90-degree turn soon if it's going to miss us, my electrician is I'm sure going to charge a multi-thousand dollar premium to get a wired generator setup in here before she hits, and I'm starting to think all this is Mother Earth shaking us off like a dog with a really bad flea infestation -- our just reward for treating her so shabbily.



Today I was in Springfield, NJ and took a side trip to World of Tile, a place I've gone past many hundreds of times in my life, most of them as a child, returning from a trip out to Route 22 to Harmony House to buy records, and perhaps a side stop at the Dairy Queen for a Buster Bar. World of Tile is out on that stretch of Route 22 in Union County that is now a sea of strip malls and megastores like you see on every other highway in the universe, with a few remnants of my childhood and businesses that advertised on AM rock 'n' roll radio still standing, like the Flagship (which is now a P.C. Richard store) and, yes, World of Tile -- a store I hadn't even thought about until I read about it on Retro Renovation. So the extra black wall tiles that I had hoped to get in case I want to replace the American Standard Ming Green bathrub with a shower pan are $12 each, because they are the original 1950's tile, so it's better to just either leave the tub alone or use the Home Depot tiles. But in one of the "showrooms" in the back, it's a cornucopia of retro bathroom floor tile, even an almost exact duplicate of the hideous green quasi-checkerboard pattern that all 1950's bathrooms have. And they have it in many, many colors, at $12.99 a square foot (though why anyone would want to replace one of these floors with the same thing, I have no idea). I was, however, happy to see that they have white 1" hex tile sheets and also black hex tile so that it's possible to do borders and flowers and other cool things with hex tile, and I will definitely go see them again after we recover from certain Generator Sticker Shock, assuming you can get near the place, because now that it's been linked in the New York Times Style section, this quirky little retro store in Springfield is going to become the hottest thing around.



Anyway, it's Labor Day weekend in a country that has been doing whatever it can go eliminate the protections and benefits that 100 years of organized labor brought us. I'm sure that out in the flyover states, where they worship people like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin and Rick Perry, they're going to fly flags and grill hamburgers and "celebrate" Labor Day and shake the hands of their legislators who are gutting unions in a state of complete cluelessness as to what it really means.



So let's take a trip around the blogroll for some perspectives on some of the fresh horrors that this week in Year Three of the American Racial Freakout saw.



Karen Garcia gives a well-deserved smack to that shandeh far di goyim Eric Cantor.



How does this differ, really, from Obama's allegedly proposed "worker training program"?



If you were hit by Irene, maybe you'll start listening to Kindly Old Uncle Bustednuckles, finally.



Katherine Haenschen at Burnt Orange Report has the top Google searches for Rick Perry.



Cool historical Labor Day stuff at Ramona's Voices.



Driftglass: The Big Jobs Fuck.



You'll never hear about this on your local network news, but Oil is resurfing again not far from the location of the BP Macondo Well.



Gossip or truth? Go read this at Mudflats and decide. I'll tell you this much: whether Sarah Palin runs for president or not, she is definitely going to have a very hard time when the looks start to go -- no matter how much botox or surgery she has. Time bows to no surgeon. We're seeing it already. You could almost feel sorry for her if she wasn't such a bitch.



Helen Philpot, as always, cuts to the chase.



The Perry Platform is the new Shit My Dad Says.



And now I'm going to go pay some bills and wonder if I'll be able to get fresh corn tomorrow. After all, what's the point of making a quinoa salad with summer vegetables if I have to use frozen roasted corn from Trader Joe's?

I am not ready for my childhood to be "retro" -- but it is.

When we first bought our house, a friend came over with her mother on the day we closed, took one look around, and said "You are going to be working on this house until the day you die."



After fifteen years and about $60,000 worth of siding, windows, roofing, gutters, a refinished basement, two water heaters, a furnace, and an upgraded electrical panel, I'm still ashamed to have a party. The longer you live in a house, the more daunting it becomes to have work done in it.



My next project (and I know my limitations so I don't end up on Renovation Realities), was going to be the downstairs bathroom. It's a 1950's cape cod house, so the bathroom is one of those tiny 5 x 7 functional-only bathrooms. I had a bath designer come out, and explained to her my vision of a step into yesteryear with gleaming white subway tile, a pan shower replacing the hulking seafoam-green tub with the massive rusting chip in it and the curved bottom that plots to kill me every time I step into it, and white hex tile with black accents. I knew the minute she walked in the door that her company would not try to get this job, because she came armed with a fat stack of glossy brochures from the kind of high-end cabinetry companies to which I'm sure the Real Housewives of New Jersey refer when remodeling their bathrooms every five years, sending the old fixtures to Green Demolitions.



Then Mr. Brilliant was laid off in January, and I started looking around said bathroom, and suddenly it seemed like a waste of $10,000-$15,000 to gut a bathroom with plaster walls and replace it with sheetrock. Yes, it's one of those 1950's tile bathrooms, but while most bathrooms of that era that are seafoam-green-and-black have the black tiles as accents, mine has black wall tile with the green accents. So I started to reconsider. We're hoping not to have to age in place, because the property taxes in New Jersey will kill us, assuming we're ever able to retire. So it may not pay to do the shower conversion right now. The tile is in good shape, and while the floor is a dull green that needs replacement and a new subfloor, and the holes in the ceiling that had to be punched so that a leaking pipe from the upstairs bathroom could be replaced have to be patched, but it occurred to me that perhaps this bathroom could be saved for the cost of a new vanity or sink, a few boxes of hex tile from Home Depot, a new mirror and a couple of well-placed shallow wall cabinets, a new light bar, and the labor to deal with the difficult stuff.









So I started looking around for photos that others had taken of their sow's ear bathrooms turned into silk purses. It isn't so much that I wanted to return it to its 1950's glory, though I did recently find on Freecycle a listing for an original seafoam green sink and toilet and thought about it for about five minutes until remembering that the seafoam green is the part of this bathroom I loathe most. But in these austere times, the days of the $20,000 Zen retreat seem to be over.



While looking for others who had scaled back their plans, I stumbled on Pam Kueber's very cool Retro Renovations site. Pam isn't just about learning to live with mid-20th-century tackiness, she's about reveling in it as some kind of Golden Age of Design. For someone like me, who is old enough to remember chrome-wrapped boomerang kitchen tables and who worships regularly at the altar of Gustav Stickley, it was difficult to wrap my mind around this concept. But Pam's enthusiasm, and that of her readers, is so infectious that I almost found myself starting to appreciate the design sensibility of my childhood.



Almost.



But who knew that there is, in this country, an entire subculture of people who, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to make their midcentury houses look like McMansions, have chosen instead to restore them to their original hideous glory, with pink bathrooms and ugly Don Draper sofas and pink kitchen appliances and tulip chairs.



If you watch This Old House, or read the magazine, there's always a bit of self-importance about restoring an old Queen Anne, or a Victorian, or especially a Craftsman house (which is my own particular favorite design aesthetic). Perhaps it's because these eras all pre-date anyone who's still alive today, which gives them a hushed museum quality to which that kind of reverence fits. But the mid-20th-century aesthetic, with its absurd turquoise kitchens and seafoam green bathrooms and bright orange sofas and kidney-shaped coffee tables, has a kind of gleeful tastelessness that after you read Pam Kueber's blog, makes you kind of understand it, even if you aren't quite ready to contact that guy getting rid of the seafoam green bathroom sink.



Today Pam Kueber has attained that revered condition of Blog Nirvana -- a LONG profile in the New York Times. Go check it out, and then check out Retro Renovations.



As for me, next time I go to get my hair done, I'm going to check out World of Tile on Route 22 in Springfield. Who knows, they might have the same seafoam green and black floor tile that I have now, and perhaps when it hasn't been trod on for fifty years it looks awesome.