There's a lot of dust in our master bathroom right now, but I'm glad of it.

We have one of those one-piece plastic insert jobbies in the master bath (the hall bath has tile, which, while pretty, is a pain in the *** to clean all the time). In 1997, what with the strain of the years (we think the house was built in 1980, as there is a 1980 date in the toilet tank and someone scrawled 1980 in the driveway concrete before it dried), the tub cracked.

We knew it would cost money to have the insert replaced, but our jaw dropped when we discovered it would be over $1000 ($11something, as I remember). Needless to say, we had to wait until we got our tax refund back to have the work done.

This was done in the spring of 1998 with minimal fuss. The plumbers just came in one day, cut out the old one and inserted the new one. Silly me, I thought that would be the end of it. But when I went upstairs to see the work, there were big holes taken out of the drywall on top of and in narrow strips on each side of the insert.

"You'll have to get someone who does drywall to finish that," the plumber told me cheerfully as I stared. "Right now if you want to you can just tape plastic over it [!!!!!!!!] and take a shower."

Nothing doing; I didn't want a house with water damage. We asked the plumbers to recommend a drywall man and they said they had one they thought highly of. We'll call him "John."

The week before my mom was to visit, "John" checked out the bathroom. Oh, he said, that was easy. He would do the job for $300. We scheduled it for something like April 18.

My mom arrived the Sunday before that date. She was a bit wary of coming at all for her yearly visit because the doctor had seen a mysterious bruising on her head when she had not banged it, and thought it wise to take a biopsy. Three days later she found out it was scalp cancer and had to fly home to start treatment immediately. Her departure date was the same day "John" would fix the shower.

We called "John" and he had us reschedule the appointment to June 1, the soonest he could make time for us. We said fine, and on June 1 I took the day off for him to do the work. But "John" never showed up. I called his pager number all afternoon and received no response. I called his home that day and several times later to see if there had been some emergency. A woman always answered the phone and said, "I'll give him the message," but he never ever called back.

By that time we had spent the $300 we had saved on other things we needed. It became a motif every year: when we would get our tax refund we would say "This year we'll get the bathroom fixed" and then the money would go away, or we'd find no answers about a reliable drywall man. (I didn't want to hire any old person from the Yellow Pages; I wanted someone reputable whose work was known by people I trusted.) We even considered doing it ourselves, putting some type of foam insulation in the gaps and then covering it with molding, making a little "border" around the tub. But the plumbers had had to level the tub and the wall enclosure it had been in was no longer level, so the back of the tub was about two inches away from the established wall. To do it properly, a "false wall" would have be built to meet the back of the tub. Neither of us had that expertise.

Somewhere in the middle of this a friend of ours gets married one lovely day to a nice fellow from Canada. (I won't mention his name because as much as I want to brag on him, I'm sure he wouldn't want me to.) A little while later our friend and her new husband decide to convert their old garage to a den and then build another garage. They don't hire anyone, because the "nice fellow" was formerly a contractor and knows how to do all this stuff. Do it he does, on weekends and after work.

One day when we were visiting (these folks have some land and horses and we occasionally borrow their pasture for model rocket launches) we saw the "nice fellow's" work.

Wow.

Really, I was floored. One thing James and I used to love to do when we were living in the apartment was go to housing developments under construction, look around, plan what we would do with a certain house if it were ours. We got to see the houses in all phases of construction and were really appalled sometimes at how shoddy the work looked on houses that would later sell for $100,000-$300,000 dollars. But the "nice fellow's" work was marvelous, solid and workmanlike.

In the fall, fed up with the battered master bath, I finally ventured to ask "the nice fellow" if we could hire him to fix this bit of drywall. I didn't know if he could do it. He and his wife were now fixing their kitchen. But to make a long story short, he said yes, if we could wait a bit. We waited and he started on Saturday March 9.

By the way "John" talked, this job would only take one day. Having watched "the nice fellow" work, I wonder now what type of a job "John" would have done. After two days work (and I do mean work; he even had to fix the valve on our toilet because it would not shut completely and he wanted to take the tank off to have more room to work), he has still not finished yet; he will be coming over for an hour or two after his work each day to finish up! He has made certain the three walls around the shower are complete and solid, has also repaired the drywall edging around the ceiling, and is presently putting the patching compound on the wall.

As a favor for me, he also drilled a hole in our masonry fireplace so I could hang a mirror there (and ended up having to repair that a bit, too, when two of the stone facing blocks fell off due to the vibrations from his drill!).

So while I have to vacuum every night to clean up the bits of "plaster" and drywall because of my allergy, and right now the bathroom looks a fright, I don't care a bit. I know the job is being done carefully and properly, and I will praise the "nice fellow" for his hard work, if not by name, at least in public!

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 8:30:00 AM

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