My life is utterly boring. I still have no job, there’s nothing on television worth watching during the day and, yes, even I am growing tired of the US election. There are no new revelations and it’s now just up to the American people to make a decision. So let me turn to a bit of my life that has recently been not so boring: our bathroom.
Anyone who has visited our flat knows how rather horrible our bathroom is. It has carpet, it’s never clean enough despite my best efforts and it is in dire need of an updated bathroom suite. Then there’s the whole damp problem which, for the most part, is sorted out by our dehumidifier. We’d come to accept it as what it was and were content until we finally bought or rented a house. That was until the other day when my dear husband emailed me while I was visiting family in Savannah, Georgia, to tell me about the horrors he came home to.
A plumber recently fixed our cold water problem. It had virtually no pressure so you only got hot showers. That was another ‘fun’ bit about our bathroom. As it turns out, by fixing our problem he gave us another one: a leaky toilet. The water filled up so quickly and the overflow pipe was so low that it began to trickle out of the flush handle hole. The carpet was soaked through and the whole flat smelled of pee due to it being years-old and disgustingly dirty (men can’t aim for crap you know). When my husband pulled up the carpet to dry it out (after fixing the overflowing toilet himself) he discovered something far worse.
That’s right folks, it’s mouldy, rotting, soaked-through wood. We had a leaky bathtub problem already and, as you can see from the black corner, it had already started causing major problems before the toilet ever happened. It just caused us to finally see under the carpet what we had feared all along. Doesn’t it just make you want to vomit? If anyone is interested, we’re open for visitors; just don’t drink anything while you’re here lest you have to enter the bathroom of horrors.
We’re most likely going to try to put some linoleum floor down this weekend once we’re sure the wood is dry enough. Then we’re going to tell our landlord and hope they appreciate our temporary measure. If nothing else I can take comfort in two things: one, I wasn’t here when it happened and thankfully my husband is very handy and resourceful; and two, at least I finally got rid of that horrible carpet. Maybe now I can actually get my bathroom properly clean.