Bathroom Humor

Over the last month and a half we've been plunging into the world of bathroom remodeling. This means covering the upstairs in a fine layer of sawdust, adding more white hairs to our heads from splattering paint, hearing dear Luke hurl a curse word out the window, watching sweet Annie break down over obnoxious blue painters tape, being thankful for that emergency fund that Dave Ramsey told us to save up, and teaching stubborn Geddy to love taking a bath in the stall shower downstairs.

It all started with carpet around the tub. We never liked it there but we tolerated it. Then we realized that it wasn't meant to be a seashell pink but a stark white. The mold had to go! My naive belief was that we—and of course by we I meant Luke—would take out the carpet, lay down some new vinyl, and yea! Job done. Luke was all hands on and ready to finish the job in a week, then he came to the yucky orange vinyl under the carpet. After slicing, ripping, melting, and pulling out that hideous number he got to dig into damaged and crumbling underlayment. Finally he got to the beautiful subfloor. But this was only in the toilet and shower area of our two-part bathroom. We knew we had to go all the way. 

If there had been nothing on the floor the job might have been a little shorter, but naturally the toilet had to be removed. When Luke took out the toilet we decided the back deck would be the least confusing place to keep it. Geddy likes to play in the backyard. He found the toilet quite the neat attraction. As I kept trying to keep him away from the toilet while I cleaned it I thought, Huh, would it be too redneck to start potty training Geddy right there? He could run around without a diaper and if he had any accidents we could just let the neighborhood cat bury them. If he wanted to use the potty we wouldn't have to race him inside to the bathroom first!

Well Geddy decided against the potty training on the back porch, but I had trouble remembering where to use the facilities. One night I woke up with a great urge to pee, stumbled into the bathroom, and then thought to myself, Huh, when did we get one of those European toilets? The next morning I hoped it was only a dream that I had crouched over the hole in the night.

Along with the toilet, Luke had to remove our two pedestal sinks. That started a leetle leak. Geddy’s talking in his sleep woke me at four one morning. After checking on him and going back to bed I realized I heard a drip, drip, drip drip, sploop. Drip. Drip drip drip. Odd, I thought. I didn't hear that when I went to bed. Then it hit me. OH NO! The leaking from one of the sink faucets had caused the small dish we put down to overflow. I raced in there to find exactly what I feared: Our exposed subfloor was soaked. "We are going to have to cut part of it out!" I screamed in my head as I put a trashcan under the drip and used a towel to soak up the water. Luke never woke up during my frenzy. Fortunately, later in the morning he looked at it and said it would be fine. It just needed to dry. 

Well, two guys named Chip and Dale (I think those were their names) came to put the new floor in because Luke decided he wanted the floor so well done we wouldn't have to replace it in a few weeks. He still took on the plumbing and reinstalled the toilet and sinks. I ended up painting the walls with some late-night help from Luke the night before the new floor came. Of course we ran out of paint, but I won't go into that here. It was all starting to come together. Then I couldn't get the stinking sticky blue tape off from around two door frames that we had decided to leave on. So while I was crying and fuming over all the additional work, Luke took off the molding and a little bit of paint and wall with it. More crying and fuming. Then I spent a lovely afternoon scraping paint off the molding. Lesson learned: take everything off the walls to begin with and avoid the blue tape.

It was time to put the sinks back. I won't even list all the trips to Home Depot, but my wonderful husband made for a pretty hot plumber and the sinks were in solid without leaks. Then he called down the stairs to ask me to get a paper towel ready. What gross thing was he going to come hand me? I wondered. He appeared in the kitchen with white gunk on his fingers. Caulk. As I helped him wipe it off I asked him, Why didn't you wear gloves? He just smiled at me and didn't say a word.

If only this were the end of the story but I haven't much mentioned the bathtub. Right now it's nearing hour seventy-two of paint curing. Shouldn't we have painted it before the new floor went in? We don't do easy like that. Once that touch up project is over, Luke gets to caulk again and reinstall the fixtures for the shower. We did buy a new shower head, so that's fun. I do like to walk into our bathroom now and just admire it and ignore my painting mistakes. I'm thinking of permanently roping it off and making it into our museum feature. Every house should have one of those rooms, right? I can't stand the thought of something else going wrong and needing replacing so perhaps we'll just keep using the downstairs bathroom. As long as I don't head through the wrong door in the night when I need to pee, I think it will work out fine!