I'd never had any major aspirations to do morning radio. Sure, I did some morning fill-in shifts for my friend Cleopatra, back in college radio, but the idea of getting up that early every day, even unwillingly, just didn't seem worth it. And because of this, I hadn't awakened early enough to listen to any morning radio for years. I'd never even heard my own station's former morning show for the entire time I'd been working there.
So at this point, I'd been doing two weeks of waking up at the 4 a.m. ballpark to come in and read station liners and weather reports. I barely had any idea of what sort of morning show I was going to do for our new CHUrban format and everyone kept assuring me that we'd get it worked out and that our high-paid consultant (yes, the same guy who'd been our consultant before who didn't like what I was doing in the first place) would have plenty of good suggestions for how to structure a good morning show. Of course, when our station dropped the new format after those two weeks and regressed beyond Hot AC into Soft Hits, the high-paid consultant was fired once again and I found myself as the co-host of a Soft Hits format morning program alongside Cat, the former morning show co-host, with barely a day to prepare anything. Fortunately, Cat was an old hat at small town morning radio and had been through quite a number of different co-hosts before. She and I felt we could at least roll with the old format of the show until we found our feet as a new duo.
Our show was called Williams & Winston in the morning, she being the Williams part, me being the Winston part. (When I first started working at the station, a year earlier, I knew I would need to change my on-air name since my college name of Juice Aaron just didn't sound reasonable enough for adult contemporary radio. The program director mentioned that a former general manager used to insist the on-air talent use a county name as part of their on-air name, to somehow help cement their down-home status in the minds of the listeners, hence why his on-air name was Lee Adams. Trouble is, many of Mississippi's county names are Native American, so unless I wanted to be called Oktibbeha or Yalobusha, I'd have to pick one more mundane. I chose Winston, as that was the name of my cat. It also worked well enough when I later did radio in North Carolina.)
I don't remember much about our early days on the job, other than they did not amount to great radio. Cat insisted on running the sound board, as all of her former male co-hosts had insisted on it for themselves and she wanted the power seat. This was fine with me, though I confess to feeling like a guy watching TV without a remote in his hand. As with any relationship, it took Cat and I awhile to mesh as morning show partners. Our personalities were pretty different, with hers being more upbeat and positive and mine being more of a complaining cynic, but it was a dynamic with the potential to go places. The trouble was, as much as it felt like we were left to our own devices to create our show, we weren't. Everyone from the program director to the general manager to the station's real owners elsewhere in the state had an idea of what we should be doing differently and all of those ideas were in direct opposition to one another.
First we were told we had to keep things short and concise and play more music. Then we were supposed to get more guests on the show, but then we could only do interviews in short concise bundles while playing more music. Then we were told we needed to do more community-based material, spotlighting a new town in our listening area each day and basically giving a book report about the history of that town and interviewing the mayor, if we could find him, but doing all this only in concise bundles while playing more music. We were even told at one point, and I'm not making this up, that we should study the statistics from the most recent Arbitron ratings period, pinpoint the precise moments when listeners from area communities had reported they began listening to the radio on specific days, and target material about those areas for those precise moments in our daily schedule. Unfortunately, there is NOTHING interesting about Verona, Mississippi, beyond the fact that they have the slowest Hardees in all the world, so we were screwed there too.
After a couple months of weekly pressure to keep our yaps as shut as possible, someone upstairs turned the valve the other direction and we were told we should instead talk a great deal more than we were. In fact, the PD threatened to come into the station in the dead of night and remove all of the CDs from the on-air room, leaving us with no alternative but to yammer on between commercial breaks. We were supposed to try and be like John Boy & Billy and do more bits. This was actually more like my mental image of morning radio, but was still a pretty big extreme to have to deal with on a dime. The PD didn't steal the CDs, but for the next few weeks we were hammered to bring more material in. Then, just as suddenly, the philosophy switched back in the other direction and we were told to reign it in even more extreme than before.
What I didn't find out until later was that these whiplash-inducing programming whims were not being made locally, but were being passed down from on high by the station's owners. Our station was owned by a gentleman further south who owned lots of other stations throughout the region, and who had a number of sons who managed them. Ours was the only one he owned in our particular neck of the state and one of the only ones not managed by one of his kids. That being the case, each of his sons took it upon themselves to tell us what we were doing wrong on a regular basis and, just like no one could locally agree on what to do with us, none of them could agree either. We were supposed to be barely noticeable among the music. We were supposed to have no music. We were supposed to be John Boy & Billy. We were supposed to argue with each other. We were supposed to shut up.
Meanwhile, the ratings for Schizophrenia 93.3 weren't doing too well. Imagine that. It couldn't be the fault of the shitty music we were pumping out or the asinine satellite jocks we played during the day, so it had to be the fault of one of some the only live programming we had, right? Having learned the hard lessons of commercial radio, I was becoming somewhat fearful for my job. There was only so long that management was going to tolerate low numbers, even taking into account the drop off and slow rebuild from the station's polar shift in format. The only thing Cat and I could do, though, was either continue to try and do what we were told or find our own way. I'd like to be able to say we just took a stand and actively ignored what we were told, but mostly it just sort of happened that way on its own in an unspoken manner. I think we both were feeling pretty dismal about our prospects, so we just sort of forged on as best we could and hoped for the best.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Radio Days (Part 1)
The demise of the Adam Carolla show due to a station format switch got me thinking about my own former career in radio and how I wound up as a morning show DJ due to a similar switch.
I got into radio in college, where I used the same name I use here, Juice. S. Aaron, as my on-air name at WMSV 91.1, a 14,000 watt station broadcasting from Mississippi State University. I'd wanted to be a DJ for years, ever since a judge at a high school speech contest I was competing at told me I should be in radio, but MSU didn't have a radio broadcasting major, nor a campus radio station at the time I started college. When WMSV started up in `92, I knew I had to get in there, and I indeed became one of the DJs who went on the air on the first day of the station's life. Within a few months I had graduated to a daily two hour afternoon shift and, more months later a three hour shift. By then, MSU had a radio broadcasting major in place, but all the classes were taught during my air shift, so I opted for experience over book learning. For two and a half years I had the time of my life doing more or less what I wanted to on the air. And in addition to my daily airshift, I also got to create and co-host a weekly 15 minute show (cause the man wouldn't give us 30) about comics and general nerdity called Juice & Joe's Four Colour Theatre. We got to interview loads of comic professionals, spout off about how much we hated Rob Liefeld and have an absolute blast. Was it all great stuff? Probably only in retrospect, but damn if I didn't have fun.
I took my first real-world commercial radio job in Tupelo, MS, shortly after graduation. It was only weekends at first, requiring me to drive the hour from Starkville to Tupelo, sometimes twice a weekend. Soon enough, though, I was offered the chance to do a month of fill-in work for vacationing DJs. I took this as a good sign and packed up and moved from Starkville to Tupelo, taking up residency in a festering hellhole of an apartment, where I met my future wife.
On the day of my move to Tupelo, I experienced the first of several hard lessons of commercial radio. I had just dropped by the station to pick up my paycheck and the manager brought everyone into the on air studio to let us know that the co-host of the morning show, a guy named Steve, had just been fired and was no longer to be allowed in the building. I'd only met Steve a couple of times, but he seemed like a really nice guy. I couldn't imagine what he'd done to be banned from the building. Turned out, Steve's crime was that his involvement with the morning show had not produced the ratings that the station wanted. Evidently, when he'd signed on to co-host the show, it had been part of his contract that the ratings would grow or the station could terminate his employment. This was very very different from college radio, where I'd seen people fired before but mostly for doing things like falling asleep during their air shift. (Hi, Ryan!)
Life went on.
At about the time the vacation fill-ins ended, a temporary overnight shift opened up. This was a shift created to cover the month or so between the time the station discontinued using their expensive satellite overnight service and when they began using a new computer automation system. I didn't care. It might have been temporary work, but it was steady temporary work and it allowed me to remain in my crappy festering hellhole of an apartment for another month. And eat.
Toward the middle of that overnights run, though, I was offered the chance to take over afternoon drive, which I readily accepted. What I didn't know until later was that this promotion was due to the station's hired consultant, who had been listening to me, decided that my voice suited afternoon drive better than overnights and suggested they make some schedule changes. This was my next hard lesson of commercial radio, which is that any schedule change made is going to suck for somebody. My move to afternoons dislodged the afternoon guy to nights, which dislodged the nights guy to overnights, which was a position that would dissolve in under two weeks. I felt awful, particularly when the station's manager began pairing me with this guy for some wildly awkward appearances. Ultimately, though, it wasn't my decision.
Life went on.
Afternoon drive was a timeslot that suited my personal schedule quite nicely. In fact, it felt like old times, as that was what I'd been doing back in college. I didn't have to be at work until noon, didn't go on the air until 3p and was free and clear after 7p. I even wound up getting a hefty bonus for increasing the ratings in my timeslot, (part of which I used to pay for the meal the very first time I asked my future wife to go out to dinner with me). But working in commercial radio felt like working for the Borg. Creativity was encouraged only within the very narrow confines of what the station's high-paid consultant was willing to accept. Mostly, he didn't seem to like what I was doing nor did he like the way I did it. Fortunately, a couple months into my time there, the highly paid consultant was fired and then I had to live by the rules of our program director. While less strict, his rules were not so much freeing in a creative sense as they were geared toward trying to get me to be a better DJ from a technical standpoint. Frankly, this is what I needed.
Life went on.
After a year on afternoons, I had another hard lesson of commercial radio. I got called in early one morning for a meeting with the station's manager and program director. I was told that station's Hot Adult Contemporary music format (think lots of up-tempo Rod Stewart) was being changed to a Contemporary Hits Radio/Urban format (think lots of Chumbawumba), in order to compete with similar stations in the area that were getting the kind of numbers they wanted. Subsequently, the mid-day guy had been fired for not having a "CHUrban"-sounding voice, and I (a guy who also doesn't have that kind of voice, but was at least youthful) had somehow been promoted to doing the new morning show from 5 to 9a. The good news was that it came with a pay raise, but not one commensurate to the amount of soul/sanity erosion that would occur from having to wake up at 4a. every day.
I never got to see what sort of CHUrban morning DJ I would have been--though I'd wager, not a great one, as that just doesn't suit my personality. The plan of action for the new station was for me to spend the first two weeks just saying the new station imaging and doing the weather, then we'd transition into a real morning show. However, during those two weeks, all of our ad-sales people were trying desperately to get all our advertisers to keep buying ads with us despite the fact that the station had undergone a violent demographic shift toward people who don't have any money. It didn't work. The advertisers dropped us as fast as we'd dropped Van Morrison, prompting the station's owners to decide the whole thing had been a mistake. Rather than returning to Hot AC, they instead decided to dial it down even further into a Soft Hits format (think lots of slow-tempo Rod Stewart). And since they'd lost so much money, they decided to come back the cheap route, with the station largely automated except for the morning show and mid-days. I would continue hosting the morning show, along with the former female morning show co-host, and mid-days would be resumed by the rehired former mid-day guy. Come Monday, we would be starting a new morning show.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
I got into radio in college, where I used the same name I use here, Juice. S. Aaron, as my on-air name at WMSV 91.1, a 14,000 watt station broadcasting from Mississippi State University. I'd wanted to be a DJ for years, ever since a judge at a high school speech contest I was competing at told me I should be in radio, but MSU didn't have a radio broadcasting major, nor a campus radio station at the time I started college. When WMSV started up in `92, I knew I had to get in there, and I indeed became one of the DJs who went on the air on the first day of the station's life. Within a few months I had graduated to a daily two hour afternoon shift and, more months later a three hour shift. By then, MSU had a radio broadcasting major in place, but all the classes were taught during my air shift, so I opted for experience over book learning. For two and a half years I had the time of my life doing more or less what I wanted to on the air. And in addition to my daily airshift, I also got to create and co-host a weekly 15 minute show (cause the man wouldn't give us 30) about comics and general nerdity called Juice & Joe's Four Colour Theatre. We got to interview loads of comic professionals, spout off about how much we hated Rob Liefeld and have an absolute blast. Was it all great stuff? Probably only in retrospect, but damn if I didn't have fun.
I took my first real-world commercial radio job in Tupelo, MS, shortly after graduation. It was only weekends at first, requiring me to drive the hour from Starkville to Tupelo, sometimes twice a weekend. Soon enough, though, I was offered the chance to do a month of fill-in work for vacationing DJs. I took this as a good sign and packed up and moved from Starkville to Tupelo, taking up residency in a festering hellhole of an apartment, where I met my future wife.
On the day of my move to Tupelo, I experienced the first of several hard lessons of commercial radio. I had just dropped by the station to pick up my paycheck and the manager brought everyone into the on air studio to let us know that the co-host of the morning show, a guy named Steve, had just been fired and was no longer to be allowed in the building. I'd only met Steve a couple of times, but he seemed like a really nice guy. I couldn't imagine what he'd done to be banned from the building. Turned out, Steve's crime was that his involvement with the morning show had not produced the ratings that the station wanted. Evidently, when he'd signed on to co-host the show, it had been part of his contract that the ratings would grow or the station could terminate his employment. This was very very different from college radio, where I'd seen people fired before but mostly for doing things like falling asleep during their air shift. (Hi, Ryan!)
Life went on.
At about the time the vacation fill-ins ended, a temporary overnight shift opened up. This was a shift created to cover the month or so between the time the station discontinued using their expensive satellite overnight service and when they began using a new computer automation system. I didn't care. It might have been temporary work, but it was steady temporary work and it allowed me to remain in my crappy festering hellhole of an apartment for another month. And eat.
Toward the middle of that overnights run, though, I was offered the chance to take over afternoon drive, which I readily accepted. What I didn't know until later was that this promotion was due to the station's hired consultant, who had been listening to me, decided that my voice suited afternoon drive better than overnights and suggested they make some schedule changes. This was my next hard lesson of commercial radio, which is that any schedule change made is going to suck for somebody. My move to afternoons dislodged the afternoon guy to nights, which dislodged the nights guy to overnights, which was a position that would dissolve in under two weeks. I felt awful, particularly when the station's manager began pairing me with this guy for some wildly awkward appearances. Ultimately, though, it wasn't my decision.
Life went on.
Afternoon drive was a timeslot that suited my personal schedule quite nicely. In fact, it felt like old times, as that was what I'd been doing back in college. I didn't have to be at work until noon, didn't go on the air until 3p and was free and clear after 7p. I even wound up getting a hefty bonus for increasing the ratings in my timeslot, (part of which I used to pay for the meal the very first time I asked my future wife to go out to dinner with me). But working in commercial radio felt like working for the Borg. Creativity was encouraged only within the very narrow confines of what the station's high-paid consultant was willing to accept. Mostly, he didn't seem to like what I was doing nor did he like the way I did it. Fortunately, a couple months into my time there, the highly paid consultant was fired and then I had to live by the rules of our program director. While less strict, his rules were not so much freeing in a creative sense as they were geared toward trying to get me to be a better DJ from a technical standpoint. Frankly, this is what I needed.
Life went on.
After a year on afternoons, I had another hard lesson of commercial radio. I got called in early one morning for a meeting with the station's manager and program director. I was told that station's Hot Adult Contemporary music format (think lots of up-tempo Rod Stewart) was being changed to a Contemporary Hits Radio/Urban format (think lots of Chumbawumba), in order to compete with similar stations in the area that were getting the kind of numbers they wanted. Subsequently, the mid-day guy had been fired for not having a "CHUrban"-sounding voice, and I (a guy who also doesn't have that kind of voice, but was at least youthful) had somehow been promoted to doing the new morning show from 5 to 9a. The good news was that it came with a pay raise, but not one commensurate to the amount of soul/sanity erosion that would occur from having to wake up at 4a. every day.
I never got to see what sort of CHUrban morning DJ I would have been--though I'd wager, not a great one, as that just doesn't suit my personality. The plan of action for the new station was for me to spend the first two weeks just saying the new station imaging and doing the weather, then we'd transition into a real morning show. However, during those two weeks, all of our ad-sales people were trying desperately to get all our advertisers to keep buying ads with us despite the fact that the station had undergone a violent demographic shift toward people who don't have any money. It didn't work. The advertisers dropped us as fast as we'd dropped Van Morrison, prompting the station's owners to decide the whole thing had been a mistake. Rather than returning to Hot AC, they instead decided to dial it down even further into a Soft Hits format (think lots of slow-tempo Rod Stewart). And since they'd lost so much money, they decided to come back the cheap route, with the station largely automated except for the morning show and mid-days. I would continue hosting the morning show, along with the former female morning show co-host, and mid-days would be resumed by the rehired former mid-day guy. Come Monday, we would be starting a new morning show.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Another of life's joys crushed beneath the heel of the Man.
I'm really pissed off and depressed today. Yet another of my favorite things on the planet is coming to a premature end.
First Pushing Daisies, my favorite new TV series of the past five years and, frankly, one of the most amazing pieces of television I've ever seen, was canceled by ABC. And now, or as of tomorrow, so will the AdamCarolla radio show.
I've been a fan of Carolla since his days with the Loveline MTV series in the 1990s (I never got to hear him on the Loveline radio show, though I will now have to go out and find some mirror archive sites and pod some classic episodes.) Later, when he and Jimmy Kimmel (who I was a big fan of from his days with Win Ben Stein's Money) paired up for the Man Show, I thought it was a damn genius pairing and an ingenious concept that largely worked that way in execution.
Back when Howard Stern (who I was not so much of a fan of) abandoned the planet's surface for satellite radio, Carolla was named as the west coast replacement for the timeslot on CBS radio and offered in syndication in the same markets Stern had out there. As I don't live on the west coast or Las Vegas or Seattle and wasn't into podcasting then, I didn't listen. However, back in October, I finally paid attention to the Adam Carolla show ads in iTunes and subscribed to the show.
It took me a little while to warm up to the show. The show itself was oddly formatted. Instead of breaking it into four segments per-day for each hour of the show, it was split into a dozen or so segments between commercial breaks. At first, I didn't want to hear any part of the show that wasn't pre-labeled as something I might like, so I stuck to listening to interviews with people I liked. After a couple weeks, though, I began listening to the comedy bits. And when that wasn't enough, I began listening to the How Say You q&a segments that opened each morning's show. Soon, I was listening to the news and then the whole show (which is great to do as a podcast listener, cause they cut out all the commercials). The improv-based dynamic of Carolla, his co-host Teresa Strasser and sound-drops guy "Bald" Bryan works really well and is pretty much everything I find entertaining about radio and comedy all rolled into one. I find Adam's "righteous angry complainer" persona infinitely amusing, particularly when I agree with what he's complaining about. And his rapport with frequent guests Joel McHale from E's The Soup (who I'm a major fan of, too) and David Allan Greer (who's habitual snoring during Teresa's news NEVER gets old for me) just makes for some amazing radio. Very little of it feels scripted. Most of it is on the fly comedy, the results of which can sometimes be astounding. It's the radio show I dreamed of being a part of back when I actually did morning radio, but freely admit that I didn't have the talent (nor the managerial support) to pull off at that level.
From what I understand, I started listening to Adam Carolla at a very good time. He went through a couple of years of different co-hosts (including Danny Bonaduce, who I have very little patience for) that didn't quite gel. The current lineup was, to me, a perfect one which I look (or, rather, looked) forward to hearing on a daily basis. I even went out and upped my Carolla intake by catching his movie The Hammer on DVD. I highly recommend it for fans and non-fans alike. It's a sports movie with a heart that Adam co-wrote and produced. And while the low budget sometimes hurts it (just pay attention to the incredibly small and majority female audience of the movie's boxing championship grand finale), it's a very funny film with a lot of heart and does not in any way deserve the R rating it received. ESPN Magazine named it the best sports film of 2008 and I'd put it in my top most enjoyed I saw then, too.
All good things must come to an end.
A week ago, a stray thought popped into my head: I wondered if the poor economy in California might cause a financial shift in the radio markets, perhaps causing upper management to reconsider pricey salaries for certain talent. It was the sort of stray thought that I may have to file under the banner of being one of my infrequent episodes of "bad craziness." Yesterday on the show, a listener phoned in to ask Carolla point blank if his show was ending, because there had been rumors to that effect online. Carolla said that he would have a major announcement on Thursday's show. We can now read in the news at least the basic facts of at least part of this announcement. The gist: Carolla's home station is switching formats from newstalk to Top 40.
As Carolla himself might say, "What the EFF is up with that ESS?"
Turns out, all is not necessarily bad news, though it's certainly not great.
Thanks to live streaming at his site, I've now been able to hear a bit of the big announcement this morning. As he hinted yesterday, there are plans in the works for a Carolla continuation following Friday's final KLSX show. Because of his contract with CBS radio, Carolla's still getting paid through the end of the year, so he's not hurting for cash. His plan is to continue broadcasting via podcast, though not with the full compliment of Teresa and Bryan and in something of a more traditional podcast reduced format. His logic, which is sound, is that the internet is the future for programming of all sorts. It will soon be in cars, allowing folks to drag their favorite podcasts with them wherever they go (I already do via my Zen Vision-M) and podcasting is slowly but surely becoming a viable money-maker. His goal, he says, is not to make a lot of money (as he's basically doing the show for free to start out, with a hopeful payday down the road, similar to the business models of Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Pardo) but to make enough to pay a few people to join up with him.
As he says himself, "As I've said many times, I would do this show for free if that's all they had to offer. And I guess I'm going to have to back up my words now because I am going to do the show for free."
The beginning of the show will be bare bones with just Carolla, his tech guy Mike and his buddy the Weeze, broadcasting from his home. Down the line, he hopes to bring in guests and eventually be able to bring back Teresa and Bryan. I really hope so, because to me they form a power trio that makes not only the show better but also one another. Whereas on some shows the female co-host is basically there to sit and laugh at the host's jokes, Teresa has always exhibited great intelligence, in addition to her on-the-fly wit. And "Bald" Bryan's real-time skills at finding and executing unique sound drops, or pulling quotes out of context to play at ironic times, is simply amazing. You would think it was all planned out in advance, cued up and ready to go, but from everything I've heard, it's actually done largely on the spot.
Much like I support Jimmy Pardo's efforts to find payment in podcasting, I've no doubt Carolla will eventually find something that works. He'll also be among the innovators that take podcasting to new levels.
I started this post pissed off and depressed, but have now moved on to something more akin to hopeful melancholic acceptance.
The new podcast will be available at AdamCarolla.com starting Monday morning.
First Pushing Daisies, my favorite new TV series of the past five years and, frankly, one of the most amazing pieces of television I've ever seen, was canceled by ABC. And now, or as of tomorrow, so will the AdamCarolla radio show.
I've been a fan of Carolla since his days with the Loveline MTV series in the 1990s (I never got to hear him on the Loveline radio show, though I will now have to go out and find some mirror archive sites and pod some classic episodes.) Later, when he and Jimmy Kimmel (who I was a big fan of from his days with Win Ben Stein's Money) paired up for the Man Show, I thought it was a damn genius pairing and an ingenious concept that largely worked that way in execution.
Back when Howard Stern (who I was not so much of a fan of) abandoned the planet's surface for satellite radio, Carolla was named as the west coast replacement for the timeslot on CBS radio and offered in syndication in the same markets Stern had out there. As I don't live on the west coast or Las Vegas or Seattle and wasn't into podcasting then, I didn't listen. However, back in October, I finally paid attention to the Adam Carolla show ads in iTunes and subscribed to the show.
It took me a little while to warm up to the show. The show itself was oddly formatted. Instead of breaking it into four segments per-day for each hour of the show, it was split into a dozen or so segments between commercial breaks. At first, I didn't want to hear any part of the show that wasn't pre-labeled as something I might like, so I stuck to listening to interviews with people I liked. After a couple weeks, though, I began listening to the comedy bits. And when that wasn't enough, I began listening to the How Say You q&a segments that opened each morning's show. Soon, I was listening to the news and then the whole show (which is great to do as a podcast listener, cause they cut out all the commercials). The improv-based dynamic of Carolla, his co-host Teresa Strasser and sound-drops guy "Bald" Bryan works really well and is pretty much everything I find entertaining about radio and comedy all rolled into one. I find Adam's "righteous angry complainer" persona infinitely amusing, particularly when I agree with what he's complaining about. And his rapport with frequent guests Joel McHale from E's The Soup (who I'm a major fan of, too) and David Allan Greer (who's habitual snoring during Teresa's news NEVER gets old for me) just makes for some amazing radio. Very little of it feels scripted. Most of it is on the fly comedy, the results of which can sometimes be astounding. It's the radio show I dreamed of being a part of back when I actually did morning radio, but freely admit that I didn't have the talent (nor the managerial support) to pull off at that level.
From what I understand, I started listening to Adam Carolla at a very good time. He went through a couple of years of different co-hosts (including Danny Bonaduce, who I have very little patience for) that didn't quite gel. The current lineup was, to me, a perfect one which I look (or, rather, looked) forward to hearing on a daily basis. I even went out and upped my Carolla intake by catching his movie The Hammer on DVD. I highly recommend it for fans and non-fans alike. It's a sports movie with a heart that Adam co-wrote and produced. And while the low budget sometimes hurts it (just pay attention to the incredibly small and majority female audience of the movie's boxing championship grand finale), it's a very funny film with a lot of heart and does not in any way deserve the R rating it received. ESPN Magazine named it the best sports film of 2008 and I'd put it in my top most enjoyed I saw then, too.
All good things must come to an end.
A week ago, a stray thought popped into my head: I wondered if the poor economy in California might cause a financial shift in the radio markets, perhaps causing upper management to reconsider pricey salaries for certain talent. It was the sort of stray thought that I may have to file under the banner of being one of my infrequent episodes of "bad craziness." Yesterday on the show, a listener phoned in to ask Carolla point blank if his show was ending, because there had been rumors to that effect online. Carolla said that he would have a major announcement on Thursday's show. We can now read in the news at least the basic facts of at least part of this announcement. The gist: Carolla's home station is switching formats from newstalk to Top 40.
As Carolla himself might say, "What the EFF is up with that ESS?"
Turns out, all is not necessarily bad news, though it's certainly not great.
Thanks to live streaming at his site, I've now been able to hear a bit of the big announcement this morning. As he hinted yesterday, there are plans in the works for a Carolla continuation following Friday's final KLSX show. Because of his contract with CBS radio, Carolla's still getting paid through the end of the year, so he's not hurting for cash. His plan is to continue broadcasting via podcast, though not with the full compliment of Teresa and Bryan and in something of a more traditional podcast reduced format. His logic, which is sound, is that the internet is the future for programming of all sorts. It will soon be in cars, allowing folks to drag their favorite podcasts with them wherever they go (I already do via my Zen Vision-M) and podcasting is slowly but surely becoming a viable money-maker. His goal, he says, is not to make a lot of money (as he's basically doing the show for free to start out, with a hopeful payday down the road, similar to the business models of Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Pardo) but to make enough to pay a few people to join up with him.
As he says himself, "As I've said many times, I would do this show for free if that's all they had to offer. And I guess I'm going to have to back up my words now because I am going to do the show for free."
The beginning of the show will be bare bones with just Carolla, his tech guy Mike and his buddy the Weeze, broadcasting from his home. Down the line, he hopes to bring in guests and eventually be able to bring back Teresa and Bryan. I really hope so, because to me they form a power trio that makes not only the show better but also one another. Whereas on some shows the female co-host is basically there to sit and laugh at the host's jokes, Teresa has always exhibited great intelligence, in addition to her on-the-fly wit. And "Bald" Bryan's real-time skills at finding and executing unique sound drops, or pulling quotes out of context to play at ironic times, is simply amazing. You would think it was all planned out in advance, cued up and ready to go, but from everything I've heard, it's actually done largely on the spot.
Much like I support Jimmy Pardo's efforts to find payment in podcasting, I've no doubt Carolla will eventually find something that works. He'll also be among the innovators that take podcasting to new levels.
I started this post pissed off and depressed, but have now moved on to something more akin to hopeful melancholic acceptance.
The new podcast will be available at AdamCarolla.com starting Monday morning.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Arr Baffroom Advencha, Part NIN
This weekend we put in the Hardiboard.
We chose Hardiboard over Durock cement board because... um... well, okay, I don't really know. I tuned out after about minute two of the five minute lecture from the guy at Lowes as to its advantages. But we were assured it was fantastic stuff, super easy to work with and would give us no problems at all. And while all of that might be true for some people, namely folks used to working with cement board who know what they're doing and who probably listened to the guy at Lowes better than we did, it was not true for us. This is not to say that we regret using Hardiboard over Durock, just that it wasn't exactly a party.
First off, it took me a long time to get over Hardiboard's texture, which is something akin to the surface of a chalk-board magnified by a power of ten. Simply touching it gave me the heebie jeebies, and I speak as a guy who is entirely comfortable in scraping his fingernails down a chalkboard. Touching Hardiboard was like scraping your hands across silk cloth, in the dead of winter, with no moisturizer, when they're good and rough, only in reverse. (And, let me tell you, after you'd been handling Hardiboard bare-handed for a while, you couldn't touch cloth of any kind.) I wound up wearing work gloves for about half of Saturday until my anger at having limited dexterity in the gloves (and the fact that the fingers of the gloves kept getting pinched between the board and the drywall) overpowered my discomfort and I forced my mind to get over it. After that, I didn't think about it much.
The second major drawback to Hardiboard was that it did not always live up to its billing as far as ease of use. We'd been told all you had to do was score the surface of it and snap it toward the score and you'd get clean lines with no worries. And, to some degree, this is true provided the sections you're snapping apart are both several inches wide. You work with anything smaller than three or four and there's a lot of breaking bits off one at a time with a pair of channel locks. I'm gonna give Hardiboard a pass on this one, considering that I'm the guy who was usually doing the snapping.
The other major drawback to Hardiboard is that it's deadly. It's made of silicate, which is basically sand, but microscopically fine sand held together by cement (or dog spit, for all I know). It's mostly harmless in board form (mostly, cause it is sort of rough and can cut you if you're not careful), but snapping it breaks some of that silicate dust free so that it can be inhaled. If it gets in your lungs, it can eventually cause cancer or pneumonia and so you're really not supposed to do much breathing around it. Furthermore, you're not supposed to sweep it up, cause that just stirs up the dust. So the only way to get rid of it is to vacuum it up (which I'm sure is also inadvisable, since I'm the guy who'll have to change the bag), or soak it up with a damp towel. The whole day, I kept imagining that my lungs were starting to burn and by late afternoon when I was hammer drilling the stuff into the bare flooring of the bathroom, I'd switched to a respirator.
Of course, as with nearly every step of our project so far, each part of this weekend's work took far longer than we'd hoped and revealed problems we'd not expected that we had to solve before we could move on, such as having to carve out even MORE drywall in order to toe in some new semi-studs that could support both the Hardiboard and drywall we'll eventually put there.
We also wound up smashing some valuables, of both the actual and sentimental varieties, we'd been storing on some display shelves attached to the other side of one of the walls. One of the items was an antique milk jar, the kind the milk man might leave on a doorstep, filled with even older antique marbles that had belonged to my grandfather. The marbles are fine, but the milk jar wound up vibrating off the edge of its shelf due to our hammer drilling on the other side, fell and smashed.
Our major problem, though, wound up being the position of the plumbing valve, as well as the pipes attached to it. It was not set far enough back within the wall to allow the new metal shower lever to sit flush against the backplate, as we preferred, so we wound up having to remove an entire section of Hardiboard in order to make adjustments. And even then, we had to calculate and recalculate the anticipated thickness of not only the tile we'll eventually install, but the mastic and gold coat that would sit between it and the Hardiboard, too. Kind of hard to do when you don't have the tile on hand to measure.
Fortunately, we've already ordered the tile, it's on the way and should be to us by the weekend. In the meantime, I get to Goldcoat waterproof the new walls in anticipation of the mastic and tile to come.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
We chose Hardiboard over Durock cement board because... um... well, okay, I don't really know. I tuned out after about minute two of the five minute lecture from the guy at Lowes as to its advantages. But we were assured it was fantastic stuff, super easy to work with and would give us no problems at all. And while all of that might be true for some people, namely folks used to working with cement board who know what they're doing and who probably listened to the guy at Lowes better than we did, it was not true for us. This is not to say that we regret using Hardiboard over Durock, just that it wasn't exactly a party.
First off, it took me a long time to get over Hardiboard's texture, which is something akin to the surface of a chalk-board magnified by a power of ten. Simply touching it gave me the heebie jeebies, and I speak as a guy who is entirely comfortable in scraping his fingernails down a chalkboard. Touching Hardiboard was like scraping your hands across silk cloth, in the dead of winter, with no moisturizer, when they're good and rough, only in reverse. (And, let me tell you, after you'd been handling Hardiboard bare-handed for a while, you couldn't touch cloth of any kind.) I wound up wearing work gloves for about half of Saturday until my anger at having limited dexterity in the gloves (and the fact that the fingers of the gloves kept getting pinched between the board and the drywall) overpowered my discomfort and I forced my mind to get over it. After that, I didn't think about it much.
The second major drawback to Hardiboard was that it did not always live up to its billing as far as ease of use. We'd been told all you had to do was score the surface of it and snap it toward the score and you'd get clean lines with no worries. And, to some degree, this is true provided the sections you're snapping apart are both several inches wide. You work with anything smaller than three or four and there's a lot of breaking bits off one at a time with a pair of channel locks. I'm gonna give Hardiboard a pass on this one, considering that I'm the guy who was usually doing the snapping.
The other major drawback to Hardiboard is that it's deadly. It's made of silicate, which is basically sand, but microscopically fine sand held together by cement (or dog spit, for all I know). It's mostly harmless in board form (mostly, cause it is sort of rough and can cut you if you're not careful), but snapping it breaks some of that silicate dust free so that it can be inhaled. If it gets in your lungs, it can eventually cause cancer or pneumonia and so you're really not supposed to do much breathing around it. Furthermore, you're not supposed to sweep it up, cause that just stirs up the dust. So the only way to get rid of it is to vacuum it up (which I'm sure is also inadvisable, since I'm the guy who'll have to change the bag), or soak it up with a damp towel. The whole day, I kept imagining that my lungs were starting to burn and by late afternoon when I was hammer drilling the stuff into the bare flooring of the bathroom, I'd switched to a respirator.
Of course, as with nearly every step of our project so far, each part of this weekend's work took far longer than we'd hoped and revealed problems we'd not expected that we had to solve before we could move on, such as having to carve out even MORE drywall in order to toe in some new semi-studs that could support both the Hardiboard and drywall we'll eventually put there.We also wound up smashing some valuables, of both the actual and sentimental varieties, we'd been storing on some display shelves attached to the other side of one of the walls. One of the items was an antique milk jar, the kind the milk man might leave on a doorstep, filled with even older antique marbles that had belonged to my grandfather. The marbles are fine, but the milk jar wound up vibrating off the edge of its shelf due to our hammer drilling on the other side, fell and smashed.
Our major problem, though, wound up being the position of the plumbing valve, as well as the pipes attached to it. It was not set far enough back within the wall to allow the new metal shower lever to sit flush against the backplate, as we preferred, so we wound up having to remove an entire section of Hardiboard in order to make adjustments. And even then, we had to calculate and recalculate the anticipated thickness of not only the tile we'll eventually install, but the mastic and gold coat that would sit between it and the Hardiboard, too. Kind of hard to do when you don't have the tile on hand to measure.Fortunately, we've already ordered the tile, it's on the way and should be to us by the weekend. In the meantime, I get to Goldcoat waterproof the new walls in anticipation of the mastic and tile to come.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Monday, February 16, 2009
Small Deaths #5: Marquis de Sadie Strikes Again
(An ongoing pictorial chronicling the small animals my dog Sadie has murdered during the course of her life. Not for the faint of heart.)
The poor miniature doggie had its nose and tail chewed off, bled out some stuffing and then was then impaled on a spiked medieval torture wheel.
We can only surmise that the intended message to us is that Sadie does not want any competition.
The poor miniature doggie had its nose and tail chewed off, bled out some stuffing and then was then impaled on a spiked medieval torture wheel.
We can only surmise that the intended message to us is that Sadie does not want any competition.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
auwa baffromo hadfensur, part ate
Sunday afternoon, I crawled under the house with a box of tools to connect the tub's drain pipe to the plumbing pipes. I don't really mind going under the house, as it's remarkably clean down there and the soil is covered in plastic sheeting. It is, however, a very tight squeeze beneath the tub, with barely any headroom and lots of nails sticking out of the flooring and joists on which one might gouge one's head.
Upon my arrival at the site, I could see we were in trouble. The drain for the new tub sits in a somewhat different place than the old one, being as the drain itself is a bit further back from the wall and requires a long pipe to connect to the upper drain and then down into the plumbing. From my place beneath the tub, I could see that the drain was resting within a notch cut half-way into one of the floor joists. It wasn't touching the upper edge of the notch, but that was the surface that prevented the elbow we had to install into the drain from fitting. Because of the cramped nature of the area, I couldn't get my sawsall in there to carve any more of it out. That being the case, I knew I would probably have to cut through it using a piece of broken hack saw blade, which I also knew would take all afternoon.
After hacking at it for a bit, I came to another realization. In order to fit that elbow, it seemed to me that most if not all of the rest of the joist would have to be cut away. Before actually doing this, I went to fetch the wife hoping her advice would be sound. She crawled down there with me to look at the problem and decided that what we really needed to do was to chisel out more of, but not all of, the notch until we could fit the elbow in. As we don't own a chisel, we had to use a medium-sized nail-puller/crow bar and a block of stray wood to whack it with. It took a while with the both of us laying on our backs and trading striking duties from different angles, but we finally chiseled through enough to get the elbow in straight. Some PVC cement products were applied and the whole thing was ready to go.
Upon my arrival at the site, I could see we were in trouble. The drain for the new tub sits in a somewhat different place than the old one, being as the drain itself is a bit further back from the wall and requires a long pipe to connect to the upper drain and then down into the plumbing. From my place beneath the tub, I could see that the drain was resting within a notch cut half-way into one of the floor joists. It wasn't touching the upper edge of the notch, but that was the surface that prevented the elbow we had to install into the drain from fitting. Because of the cramped nature of the area, I couldn't get my sawsall in there to carve any more of it out. That being the case, I knew I would probably have to cut through it using a piece of broken hack saw blade, which I also knew would take all afternoon.
After hacking at it for a bit, I came to another realization. In order to fit that elbow, it seemed to me that most if not all of the rest of the joist would have to be cut away. Before actually doing this, I went to fetch the wife hoping her advice would be sound. She crawled down there with me to look at the problem and decided that what we really needed to do was to chisel out more of, but not all of, the notch until we could fit the elbow in. As we don't own a chisel, we had to use a medium-sized nail-puller/crow bar and a block of stray wood to whack it with. It took a while with the both of us laying on our backs and trading striking duties from different angles, but we finally chiseled through enough to get the elbow in straight. Some PVC cement products were applied and the whole thing was ready to go.
But was it leakproof?
We had planned to use our first test-drive of the tub as a chance for the wife to take a nice soak, but instead we opted to just fill the tub with cold water. Once it had nearly reached the upper drain, I went out and crawled back under the house to check for leaks. I could see that it was leaking even before we tested the upper drain. Water was seeping out of the lower drain--not in a steady stream, but at least a good steady drip. Already it had puddled on the plastic beneath the house. Apparently when the tub drain had been knocked to one side it had lost some of its seal-power. Go figure.
Fortunately, according to the website of the plumber's putty we'd used, the stuff takes a good couple of days to fully set so we were still within a window during which we could remove the putty, reset the drain and seal it anew. And, after letting all the water out, this we did--the wife from above and me assisting from beneath the floor.
We gave the whole thing a good 24 hours before doing any more testing, this time with a tub full of hot soapy water. The wife had a long soak and then I did. We'd both secretly been afraid that the new tub might suck, which would make all the work we'd put into installing it seem pretty foolhardy. However, any fears we'd had were washed away in that soak. Our Kohler tub is pretty damned awesome. It's probably the roomiest, most comfortable, deepest tub we could have chosen. In fact, I have to give the wife full credit, as she'd been the one to pick out the tub and do all the research on it.
Now that the tub's in and safe, we just have the rest of the bathroom to finish.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
We had planned to use our first test-drive of the tub as a chance for the wife to take a nice soak, but instead we opted to just fill the tub with cold water. Once it had nearly reached the upper drain, I went out and crawled back under the house to check for leaks. I could see that it was leaking even before we tested the upper drain. Water was seeping out of the lower drain--not in a steady stream, but at least a good steady drip. Already it had puddled on the plastic beneath the house. Apparently when the tub drain had been knocked to one side it had lost some of its seal-power. Go figure.
Fortunately, according to the website of the plumber's putty we'd used, the stuff takes a good couple of days to fully set so we were still within a window during which we could remove the putty, reset the drain and seal it anew. And, after letting all the water out, this we did--the wife from above and me assisting from beneath the floor.
We gave the whole thing a good 24 hours before doing any more testing, this time with a tub full of hot soapy water. The wife had a long soak and then I did. We'd both secretly been afraid that the new tub might suck, which would make all the work we'd put into installing it seem pretty foolhardy. However, any fears we'd had were washed away in that soak. Our Kohler tub is pretty damned awesome. It's probably the roomiest, most comfortable, deepest tub we could have chosen. In fact, I have to give the wife full credit, as she'd been the one to pick out the tub and do all the research on it.Now that the tub's in and safe, we just have the rest of the bathroom to finish.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Monday, February 9, 2009
Small Deaths #4: Punk Cow 4.0
(An ongoing pictorial chronicling the small animals my dog Sadie has murdered during the course of her life. Not for the faint of heart.)
The corpse of Punk Cow V 4.0, a Christmas gift in 2008.
It lasted barely a week, poor thing.
The corpse of Punk Cow V 4.0, a Christmas gift in 2008.
It lasted barely a week, poor thing.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Hour Baffroom Adwencha, Part Sebmuh
On Sunday we installed the tub.I don't know if it was sleeping on the matter for a night, but it occurred to me that we really ought to think about things very carefully before attempting the installation. Our last home-improvement project was putting in a roof vent for our oven-hood and that project had been rife with things done in an improper order, such as silicone sealant failing to be applied until after the roof jack was safely nailed down beneath the singles and final connections made to the vent pipe beneath, (and, also, things done in near complete darkness, on the roof, at 8p at night, in November). I wanted to make sure we didn't run into any of those issues, so before we even touched the tub we had a good long look at it to try and see what we were forgetting to do.
It came to us pretty quickly that while we had already measured and remeasured the existing hole in the floor that would house the drain pipe from the tub, and had cut it wider to compensate for this tub being bigger than the old one, and while we had also dry-fitted the drain pipe on the tub itself, we'd not actually sealed any of the pipes, nor cemented the pvc. It was the kind of work that we really didn't want to have to do AFTER the tub was installed, which would require a lot of maneuvering in the crawlspace beneath the subfloor and we were already going to have to spend enough time down there connecting the tubs drain to the actual plumbing beneath. So we did all that.
While it was setting up, we tore out the drywall in the bathroom to allow the front flange to rotate between the studs. Our tear-out job was not pretty, and will require extra drywalling work down the road, but it'll do.
Then it was time to install the tub.
"Okay," the wife began, as we stood over the tub where it lay in our bedroom, "before we do this, I just want you to know that I love you very much. And while I'm probably going to scream at you and you're probably going to scream at me, it's not because we don't love one another."
"Same here."
Then, true to our plan, we hoisted the tub up on one end, hauled it into the bathroom and slowly and carefully began the rotation process to bring it horizontal. It was very tricky business, because one sudden move might break off a piece of the fiber-glass coated acrylic flange and make us cry bitter tears. But ever-so-slowly, our plan to pass the flange between the studs worked and the tub became horizontal. Once it was, we then had to slide it back into place against the studs of the interior wall. Trouble was, I was standing there, holding up one side of it.
"Can you get out of there?" the wife asked.
"Just shove it on in here and we'll worry about how to get me out later," I said.
As she squeezed, I looked around and tried to figure out my options. The tub is huge and my stumpy legs weren't going to get me over that 32 inch chasm. As it stood, I had one leg planted literally within the back wall, between the studs, while the other was trying to brace against the studs of the adjacent wall so that I could attempt some sort of ill-advised acrobatics.
"Can you get me a chair?" I asked.
"I can't leave. I'm holding up the tub," she said. Then, keeping one hand on the edge of the tub and bracing the other against the stud beside me, she leaned forward and said, "Go over my back."
"What?"
"Go over my back."
"Are you sure."
"Yes. Go."
So I hoisted myself out of my position, tucked forward, put the edge of my right shoulder onto the left side of the wife's back, then put my weight into it, rolling onto my back, across the wife's back and then onto my feet on the other side. I felt like Chuck Norris. (Except that, as we all know, the real Chuck could have simply floated out by the power of his carpet of body hair caught an updraft from the toilet pipe.)
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
xiS traP, erutnevdA moorffaB ruO
Well, the tub is finally in, though only by the grace of God and a long-handled spoon. I won't go into a play by play of all of it. Just know that nearly every step of the process took at least three times as long as we hoped and all tasks undertaken in the crawlspace beneath the floorboards of the house took at least twice as long as that.
Here are some highlights from Saturday:
We tore out the valve system for the old tub and put in the Price Pfister valve. Easier said than done, of course. The new tub is taller than the old, so the whole valve works and tub spout had to be elevated from their previous positions, which required some sawing out of an existing stud, the connecting of copper pipes with other copper pipes using joint-connectors, joint elbows and special copper pipe epoxy that refused to come out of the two separated plunger channels in the equal amounts required. And though we'd shut off the water while doing all this, there was still some water trying to trickle out of the cold water pipe after we'd hack-sawed through it. To combat this, the wife stuffed a wad of bread into it, saying this was an old plumber's trick that everybody knows and will result in the bread dissolving and pouring out of the valve once we turn the water back on.
After everything was epoxied and set, we turned the water back on to test for leaks. No leaks and both hot and cold water ran... at least, initially. Then there came a loud clunk from within the cold water pipe and it suddenly ceased to pour. Much theorizing and gnashing of teeth proceeded but the only thing we could think had happened was the wad of bread had clogged it. No matter how much we beat on the pipe to dislodge the clog, no water would flow. Eventually, we had to cut through it and run a coat hanger up it to poke around. Bread came out, as did a couple of balls of hardened copper pipe epoxy. Ahhhh. Seems we hadn't let the whole thing solidify enough before testing the works. We had to re-epoxy nearly every joint, because our surgery had broken almost all of the still uncured bonds.
The wife's idea was to put in the tub on Saturday night, but I knew well in advance that this was a losing proposition. The tub, as we already knew, was going to be a very tight fit which, if the dimensions provided and our measurements were to be believed, would allow no wiggle room whatsoever. Just getting it into the bathroom on its end was going to be a challenge, let alone rotated 90 degrees and lowered into place. And an addendum to those space limitations was the fact that the front flange of our tub could not be rotated the 90 degrees without passing through space currently occupied by the remaining drywall. Knowing full well how snippy the wife and I get with each other during stressful situations in which there's money and/or valuable new property on the line, I didn't think this was going to be a good scene even under the best of conditions. The knowledge that one false move might break our new tub would certainly put us on edge and I was pretty sure a fight would be inevitable. This, I pointed out and the wife agreed the possibility was high.
Instead of trying to install it, we settled for hauling the tub into the bathroom on its end, rotating it until the front flange hit drywall on both sides. Then we marked where the flange hit, that occurred, showing us where we'd have to bust the drywall out to, then we put the tub back in our bedroom and went to watch TV.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Here are some highlights from Saturday:
We tore out the valve system for the old tub and put in the Price Pfister valve. Easier said than done, of course. The new tub is taller than the old, so the whole valve works and tub spout had to be elevated from their previous positions, which required some sawing out of an existing stud, the connecting of copper pipes with other copper pipes using joint-connectors, joint elbows and special copper pipe epoxy that refused to come out of the two separated plunger channels in the equal amounts required. And though we'd shut off the water while doing all this, there was still some water trying to trickle out of the cold water pipe after we'd hack-sawed through it. To combat this, the wife stuffed a wad of bread into it, saying this was an old plumber's trick that everybody knows and will result in the bread dissolving and pouring out of the valve once we turn the water back on.
After everything was epoxied and set, we turned the water back on to test for leaks. No leaks and both hot and cold water ran... at least, initially. Then there came a loud clunk from within the cold water pipe and it suddenly ceased to pour. Much theorizing and gnashing of teeth proceeded but the only thing we could think had happened was the wad of bread had clogged it. No matter how much we beat on the pipe to dislodge the clog, no water would flow. Eventually, we had to cut through it and run a coat hanger up it to poke around. Bread came out, as did a couple of balls of hardened copper pipe epoxy. Ahhhh. Seems we hadn't let the whole thing solidify enough before testing the works. We had to re-epoxy nearly every joint, because our surgery had broken almost all of the still uncured bonds.The wife's idea was to put in the tub on Saturday night, but I knew well in advance that this was a losing proposition. The tub, as we already knew, was going to be a very tight fit which, if the dimensions provided and our measurements were to be believed, would allow no wiggle room whatsoever. Just getting it into the bathroom on its end was going to be a challenge, let alone rotated 90 degrees and lowered into place. And an addendum to those space limitations was the fact that the front flange of our tub could not be rotated the 90 degrees without passing through space currently occupied by the remaining drywall. Knowing full well how snippy the wife and I get with each other during stressful situations in which there's money and/or valuable new property on the line, I didn't think this was going to be a good scene even under the best of conditions. The knowledge that one false move might break our new tub would certainly put us on edge and I was pretty sure a fight would be inevitable. This, I pointed out and the wife agreed the possibility was high.
Instead of trying to install it, we settled for hauling the tub into the bathroom on its end, rotating it until the front flange hit drywall on both sides. Then we marked where the flange hit, that occurred, showing us where we'd have to bust the drywall out to, then we put the tub back in our bedroom and went to watch TV.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
