I Suck At Home Improvement

This past Friday, Karen and I had to forgo our usual Family Fun night for the second week in a row. Sure, we still gave our baby daughter (Briana) a bath on Friday. We, however, just did not do any family-related activities after the bath. Or more specifically, I did not do any family-related activities.

After Briana's bath, Karen was invited to my favorite sister-in-law's (Janine)... by her parents. It turns out that on Friday, Karen's parents were watching our niece (Kaleigh) and nephew (PJ) while Janine, my favorite brother-in-law (PJ) and Janine's BFF (Gretchen) went out for dinner.

And truth be told, I am guessing that it was not Karen who was actually requested to appear by my in-laws. If I had to put a wager on it, I would say that it was more the fact that my mother-in-law wanted to see Briana. Karen was just a means of transportation. Currently, my mother-in-law absolutely adores Briana. If she could, she probably would see Briana and hold her every waking moment... that is until her arm got too tired (because Briana has gotten heavy of late).

Always the good daughter, Karen decided to bring Briana over to my in-laws leaving me by my lonesome. So what does one do with ample free time? Well, in my case, I did some home improvement. Too bad I suck at home improvement.

Interestingly enough, this was the second Friday in a row where I worked on some home improvement project of some sort. The week before, I worked on fixing our toilet in our master bathroom. And to keep the whole plumbing theme going, I worked on the bathroom renovation of our first floor this past Friday.

A bunch of my friends were gracious enough to help out during the bathroom renovation on the first floor. They helped insulate, install drywall, and paint the entire room. Really, what is left is plumbing, installing the substrate for the tiles, tiling the floor, installing all the fixtures, and then eventually adding trim work. Thank you again to all of my friends who helped.

Anyway, with a couple of hours on Friday, I decided to install the substrate. I had purchased the cement board for the tiles a while ago. I had even gone so far as to cut the cement board to fit the actual room. So all that was left to do in terms of the substrate was to screw the boards to the floor. You think that would be an easy project on a Friday night.

Sadly, I was not kidding when I said I suck at home improvement. When I had measured and cut the cement board to fit the bathroom, I had also calculated the number of screws I would need to attach the boards to the floor. For anyone curious, I had a bunch of cement board screws from a project before. Based on my calculation at the time, I had plenty of screws for Friday. In fact, I was so sure of my calculations at the time that I even returned an unopened box of cement board screws that I had purchased as a precaution.

Looking back, I probably should have waited until the project was done before returning the screws because... well... I ran out of screws on Friday. It turns out, I may have deviated from my original calculation when spacing out the screws. (In other words, I may have spaced the screws closer together than I my original calculation, which meant that I would require more screws now.) Too bad I forgot to take note of my original calculation.

Needless to say, I installed what I could for the substrate (the cement board) with the limited number of screws that I had. And as much as it annoyed me to know that I should have just kept the unopened box of screws, I asked Karen to pick up a box of cement board screws on her way home. So when she did return home, I did eventually complete the installation of the cement board to the floor.