Margaret Joan's rule of thumb

My next-older sister, Margaret Joan, has joked for years about her formula for determining the amount of time a do-it-yourself project will take. My best recollection of it is this:

• Estimate the amount of time you think the job should take.
• Double it.
• Advance it to the next unit of time.

I've always found it amusing, in spite of the fact that it has too often been freakishly accurate for me. I  forgot that it also applies to contract projects.

I should have remembered that tidbit from my days in gradeschool when mother and daddy remodeled our house and mother complained frequently about "3-day delivery," which she said was the amount of time all deliveries take to arrive at the job site. Obviously, some showed up a bit earlier; most arrived a good deal later. But the contractors always assured her the needed materials would be delivered in 3 days; apparently, some 3-day stretches are longer than others.

My case is that I have toyed for a long time with the problem of corroded knobs in the upstairs bathtub that have needed to be replaced. I had a plumber in several years ago now to switch out the valves in the downstairs tub. That was a pretty serious problem that entailed taking out a kitchen cabinet shelf to get to the waterworks, but the cabinet problem was within my range of engineering, so we managed to handle it efficiently enough. And the valves downstairs weren't as badly corroded as these were, probably at least partly because I replaced them several layers of corrosion earlier.

At some past time, I took out the upstairs potty so I could tile the floor up there, and my lack of plumbing expertise meant that I spent a whole lot of time crouched in a pocket of the attic next to the bathroom wall replacing a pipe that I might not have had to replace if I'd gone to a plumbing supply house and bought a different part than the one the d-i-y shop had. (I try to ease that memory by telling myself that the pipe I replaced really was too corroded to accept the easier-to-fix part.)

That lesson was enough to tell me that the tub repair upstairs wasn't going to happen from inside an adjoining cabinet or attic; this tub abuts the outer wall of the house beyond the attic, so getting to the valves was going to require cutting in through the stucco on the outside and hoping the slope of the adjoining roof would allow that to reach the valves, or cutting out at least some of the tiles on the inside.

I called a couple of plumbers, and one offered to come out for a free estimate. The young kid who showed up for the estimate told me about a couple of options, one of which would entail only cutting through the tiles in the area where the pipes come into the system and putting a "chromette" plate behind the shower valve. The price for the plate (which turned out to be plastic) was ridiculous, but it was both more efficient and cheaper than Option 2: retiling the entire shower. (This place is 30+ years old, and I suspect the tile color in the bathrooms was "whatever was going out of style and therefore on sale cheap." Knocking out and replacing a few tiles was pretty much out of the question.)

The plumber kid told me the whole job would take a couple of hours, which would mean we'd have plenty of time to do the job, start to finish, well ahead of Soldier Son's scheduled return from overseas duty this weekend.

Or not. PK arrived as scheduled yesterday morning and carefully removed a couple of tiles in the area of the valves and frowned. He removed a few more tiles and reported the bad news: apparently because the tub is in a corner of the house, the builders had an upright running between the hot-water valve and the shower head. For reasons nobody really seems to know, the wall there is thicker than most,with two 2x4s filling the space where one should normally be. The builders had bored a hole in the front 2x4 so they could run the hot water pipe through it.

All of this meant that PK couldn't possibly reach the pipes he needed to fix without knocking out far more tiles than his little plate could cover, and he couldn't possibly finish the job in his estimated 2 hours.

I had sort of assumed I might be looking at retiling the shower anyway, so I told him to do what he needed to do. That entailed not only knocking out a lot of tiles but also building a complex piping system to move the valve stems forward enough to fit into the new single-handle valve. And cutting through the odd 2x4 that had had the pipe running through it. (PK cut it more than I think he needed to, but I think there's plenty of wood left up there to keep the house from caving in.)

By noon, I had two plumbers and a tiler in my bathtub. The tiler came in and got his measurements, looked around a bit, and assured me he could get tiles in today if I picked a style he had in stock. All I had to do was drop by his office and pick out my tiles.

When I got to his office, he showed me several suggestions, and we agreed on a plan. He didn't actually have my tiles in stock, but he expected them today, and he could have tilers at my house before noon. As long as 3-day delivery didn't come into play.

All I had to do was get the old tiles, the backboard, the mortar, and the wire mesh that used to be hung behind tiles out of the way before they arrived.

Fortunately, Number One Son has been eager to work around the house lately because I'm willing to help him pay his flight fare to go visit a buddy in Denver in January. He's pretty much paid off the ticket, but he was short on effort on last month's rent, so I was willing to bribe him to tear out the old tile. I forgot at first that I actually own a sheetrock saw, so he muddled through with a couple of cutting blades, a heavy pair of work gloves, a 22-ounce hammer, and a 2-pound sledge. Four hours or so after he started, he was finishing up with his Shop-Vac.

The tilers arrived bright and early this morning and puttered around for several hours before I had to leave for the office. I don't have any idea how long they stayed here, but when I got home, they had tiles stuck in the right places with little blue plastic separators scattered merrily throughout; they're do back tomorrow to do the grouting, and then I'll be able to get the plumbers back to finish up with the faucets and handles.

If things go well, I'll get them back here tomorrow, or they may not be able to get here until Friday.

Which means that our 2-hour job could easily fit write within MJ's estimate of 4 days.

And it's not even do-it-yourself!