Today started well enough. Then I fell asleep at 9 am. At 10 am I got a text that I needed to be at our construction site to do a walk through with the plumbers. I was in a panic. I did not have my plumbing papers together. One should always have their plumbing together. It is messy otherwise.

To keep this house in some sort of order I have 5 big binders that have all the info about the house you could find. The first binder contains contracts, plats, septic approvals, well reports, etc. The second binder contains the plans. The third binder is about the structure itself. It is about anything that is nailed to or holds up the structure. This one has the posts that hold up the floor in the loft area. It has the siding, and it has all the bathrooms. The fourth book is the overflow from the second book. It is called fixtures and finishes. Originally these two books were one but now there are two and they are both stuffed to the gills. The fifth contains furniture, lighting, wall paper, tiles, and a section called “stuff” that is a rag-tag accounting of some of the things one puts in a home that makes it feel less sterile. There are things like pictures and vases, etc in that one.

Because plumbing is such a big deal I have all of the fixtures, faucets, etc. cataloged in my book, they items are on Polyvore.com which I use as a huge electric catalog of my stuff–and others use it too which is nice. I also have everything in a cloud drive that is separated by similar organization to my books but more intelligible to others.

So, when the call came today, I was unprepared. I make a set of files for each room with the items for those rooms for each subcontractor my contractor tells me to work with. Eveyone is wonderful but I feel the need for them to have all the informiation as easily assessable as possible. I have shopped all of the the world for the things we have and it not like you could drop by the local box store and pick up the spec sheets. If anyone but me was doing this they would probboy be crazy by now.

Which is the way I felt this morning. I was groggy and WHAM! I went into a tizzy but with my spouses help we managed to get all the papers printed. He drove and I sorted. I have things in those dumb slippery plastic pages you can put handouts in and then insert the whole thing into a binder. I could not do it any other way but believe me if you have them spread over the dashboard and the driver turns a corner, or even a curve in the road they fly everywhere. I am good at catching them by now since we seem to get caught like this more than we like. We made it to the site about an hour and a half after the text came. It was a lovely meeting and we made some decisions that were really good. My spouse got to chose where the washer and dryer finally ended up which is important since all the dirty clothes end up on his to-do list. I have my binders and he has the dirty clothes. I think I have the easy end on that deal.

I ended up staying up most of the night gathering up the final details to clean up the directories in the cloud so that the plumbers could access things easily. I also made some Polyvore sets and published them. I had been making sets and keeping them as drafts so I could have a visual product board for each room. I realized if I was going to use this as a tool to show the plumbers what we had I would have to publish them. So I did. Shockingly I got immediate likes. I thought they were pretty unlikable by anyone who was not building my house but seems some people do like them.

I published three key rooms tonight. The half bath, the guest baht and the bath in our little bitty apartment. I have put them here, with their Polyvore links, for anyone who wants to know what we have by way of plumbing. When things get picked up by Polyvore they don’t always show the sale prices or in my case, the prices I worked out for things. One of the reasons we have nice things for our bathrooms is that I have been forever on the hunt for tag sale prices on cool stuff.

Between Polyvore, my big binders and my spouse, today at least, the plumbing ended up in order. It was a messy day but that is what plumbing is for.

The Guest Bathroom

The small bathroom in the small apartment. The half bath.