Friday, July 27, 2007

The Bathroom that Ate the Summer

Let me start by blaming the whole thing on my wife.  There, I feel better already.  The story begins with a little curl of flowered wallpaper that had come free of the bathroom wall.  One morning in May my wife reached up and gave it a gentle tug.  Now it was a not quite so little curl. “I guess we can redo the bathroom,” she said, as a smile bloomed across her face. And so our summer of troubles commenced.

I took the whole thing badly at first.  Sure, I knew I’d be free to go to the hardware store any time I pleased, but as I had more construction skills I figured I would end up doing more of the work.  This was irrational of me since there are categories of everyday housework where she always does more than I do. But you know how marriage goes – it’s not easy to see the fairness when you’re the one facing new chores.

Of course she’d been imagining a better bathroom for some time. She’s more visionary than I am in several categories of daily living, and so I started peeling off whole broad sheets of wallpaper and tossing them out into the hall.  When she saw the bare, glue-stained walls, I hoped she’d understand the cost of her vision. Instead, she was overjoyed at the progress we were making.  This bathroom, as tiny as it is, was going to be transformed. 

I got to work pulling down crown molding and removing the shower doors. I turned off the water and took out the sink and vanity.  I sliced the linoleum to see what was underneath, and pulled nails and pried off the lower molding.  We inspected faucet displays at Lowe’s and lighting displays at Home Depot and molding displays at Menards. I put together sawhorses for backyard painting, and we took turns painting the bead board panels that would cover the lower half of the walls.

I pulled the old metal medicine cabinet out of the wall and put up a new chunk of wallboard to fill the ghastly hole.  I painted the ceiling three times, white, and the upper walls four times, autumnal orange.  I put new fittings on all the water pipes coming into the room.  We lifted up the toilet and looked down the floor pipe into the darkness.  We scraped the old wax ring away – the one that looks like a lifetime supply of ear wax.  We carried the toilet onto the back porch, where my wife gave it the cleaning of the century while I put new tiles down on the bathroom floor.  I nailed the bead board onto the walls and ... well, there’s more, but you get the picture.

As the weeks went by, I came to a keen understanding of the limits of my own skills. Several times we took a few days off, but even then I looked into the bathroom each evening after work and tried to figure out how to do the parts I didn’t know how to do.  Crown molding is bad enough, but crown molding on crooked walls!  Dear listener, I confess the bathroom is still not done, but it’s getting there.  When I stand in the hallway and look in, I see the bright new colors, the shiny surfaces, the fresh look of things, and I can tell that in a few more weeks it’s going to be great.

And my wife deserves all the credit.  She thought of the bead board, the bold color, the new tile floor. She found the new cabinet and sink, she spotted the new faucet, she scrubbed the toilet and painted molding and ask what else she could do.  She’s the one who sees our social life opening back up, friends dropping by and being allowed to use the bathroom, if they wish.  She’s the visionary, after all – and I’m grateful that her visionary powers included a moment years ago when she thought she saw some spark of potential in me.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on July 27, 2007
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