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Pandora's Box

 I'm listening to the book "Rare Breed," a recommendation from a friend of mine, a good book, as in entertaining, but how much depth is there, TBD. It's having me write a "post" or really enter a journal entry for the first time in months, so I suppose it created an actionable item for me, and that is what I ask for when I ask for book recommendations. Are there actionable items/thoughts/concepts in the book? If not, I'll put it on the back burner for when I'm bored.

Now that that's out of the way, in the book one of the chapters is something along the line of "sign your work" in other words take pride in your work, therefore take credit for success and fault for failures. I've been super quiet lately because I also recently read a book "Drive" (I think it was in that book, I've read a bunch of books lately) that made fun of exactly my situation; again, I divert attention, but I'll get there. 

My job, if you will, is to grow my business KISC. The purpose of KISC is to allow me the freedom to direct my time where I believe it to be best spent, in other words, freedomizing on my own dollar. In the book "Drive," they talk about how folks go off and try to start their own business and get "sidetracked" into some side job and pretend they don't have time to succeed in their business they quit their job to do. Ironically that's exactly what happened to me! Hence my radio silence, a fear of being labeled a failure, for I have not been able to "build" my consulting business like I had hoped. Blaming Covid, needing to stay home with the kids, etc. "Rare Breed" helped me take a different look at my last 2 years, and they have been a wild success, and I'm about to put my name on my work. 

For our 10th anniversary, I planned to build my wife a new bathroom for our master bedroom. Most of which I had done before, as the plan was to "spruce it up," take it to studs and redo everything in the bathroom. 

I don't have a before picture, but this is an after I put in that window picture. Essentially that's the footprint in our bathroom. 13x6. The cool part about that window is that it is a non-structural wall, a gable wall as my nonconstruction background calls it. So I wasn't too concerned about making the window substantially more significant than it was; I increased the length by about 3 x. With that length, you'd need a double 2x12 as a header, so instead, I found an I-Beam 3x4 and installed that to fit; now the top of the window is nice and high, and the bottom is above the waste line, making it comfortable to not have to have a window covering if you choose not to. I am putting my name on this concept, as this would not have been something a contractor would have been willing to do. Much too outside of the box, and unless I was there during the process to understand how low that window would have been given a proper header, I would not have been able to figure out the right thing to do. Change orders are wildly expensive, and I can now understand why. Scraping a design every time something changes takes a lot of flexibility. Ironically, you can see in the picture where there was indeed a change order to the height of the window I replaced, see the cross beam to the right of the wall, after replacing probably 15 or so windows in my day, I realized when I pulled this window out, the original window was designed to be just 24" off the ground, making a window covering mandatory, at some point, an owner or maybe the original builder looked at it and said, that just won't do, and switched it out. Change order, expensive, time-consuming, and takes some out-of-the-box thinking to keep things running smoothly. 

From the other angle, this is a before:


See, such a nice bathroom, the carpet is a beautiful touch, the funny part is, I had no issue with the bathroom, it worked, and I even had to fix the mixer for the huge jetted green tub twice. Still, I was okay with it. Could it be improved? You bet, hence the reason for the "gift" it became a gift that kept on giving, still giving to this day. 

Back to the progress: 


That's essentially the same photo as above to studs, that is. My progress was going great, to studs, found only a few significant issues, including a vent pipe running across a structural wall of which I had to double beam see far right corner, three double beams. I was planning out the bathroom's footprint when I had a local expert come by and give me some pointers as to bathroom design. His response: To Be Continued. 

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