It is finished! A huge thank you to the generous donors who made this bathroom remodel possible! We managed to cover ██ ███ ██ more than half
[see update below]of the cost of this project with donations, and we can't thank you all enough for that. May your butts ride eternal, shiny and chrome.
As a part of this project, we also re-built the floor in the Lounge bathroom, which apparently had been sealed poorly, with resulting leaks on the Men's Room ceiling downstairs. We also replaced the Lounge sink, which had seen better days (and had been fucked off the wall at least twice. Please stop fucking on the sinks, thanks.)
It is a universal law that any time a contractor opens things up (whether they are a plumber, electrician, whatever), the first thing they say is, "Wow, whoever was in here before was an idiot." You hear it every time, you get used to it. But the spaghetti mess of drainage they found under the Womens' Room floor was really quite something. There was a lot of, "Why, why in the world would you do this??" Oh, also the clean-out ports for the drains were tiled over. No wonder we couldn't find them.
I've mentioned before that I suspect the plumber we had back in 2000 was actively trying to sabotage us. His crew were all his idiot sons and nephews, and multiple times I witnessed a failson spend all day laying pipe, then at the end of the day Daddy finally looks at it and says, "That's wrong, do it again". Oh, I'm so happy to be your learning experience. Anyway, how do you draw the line between incompetence and malice with someone like that? Fuck you, Benny. It's been 25 years and I'm still holding a grudge because I'm stil dealing with the aftermath.
Anyway! Beautiful, shiny new toilets! With seats!
For those of you who sponsored a toilet and purchased naming rights, the plaques should be going up this week. Keep an eye out!
Update:
When I posted this, I said that we had managed to cover the entire cost of the project with donations, but after looking at the latest invoices... "LOL no".
My original guess was that this project would be about $25,000 in contractor labor, and then another $20,000 for the toilets themselves. Well it turns out we got the toilets for much less -- $9,800 -- but because of all the stupid bullshit they found along the way, the labor took three weeks instead of five days. This project should have been "dig up and re-tile a two foot hole under each toilet, move some pipes" but because of the plumbing insanity, it ballooned into "dig up and re-tile almost the entire floor of the Women's Room, and re-do all of the drain routing". So labor and rough materials came to a bit over $60,000. We took in $43,000 in donations earmarked for the toilet project, so donations covered 60% of the total.
Which is still amazing, don't get me wrong. Thank you all so much!
But damn, nightclubs are just a hole in the sand that you shovel money into.