This weekend… don’t get me wrong–I love my mother more than anyone else on the planet so I was thrilled she let us take care of her while she and her new hip made peace–but couldn’t it have been a LITTLE smoother?
Mom came home from the hospital Friday afternoon. The plumber arrived at five p.m. Friday and stayed through six on Sunday, only going home to sleep and pick up fixtures I would never in my life willingly install in in my shower. Sure, he fixed the leak, sure, he did it on a weekend, but the whole point of having Mom here was that the entire house is one level and there’s a shower stall you can walk right into five feet from the bed.
I gotta say, there’s not much good a shower like that can do if the water is turned off virtually all weekend. And you have your parents staying with you. And your three children. With no bathroom. Or sinks. Christ on a cracker.
At first it all seemed doable. Fair enough, there was something broken inside the fixture. And the pipe needed replacing. And hell, tiles can be replaced, right? So he saws out a few tiles and says we can pop in some identical plain white ones and grout them this week. And then he proceeded to install ONE handle where there used to be two, you see, because it’s easier to get the right temperature if you’re not fiddling with two handles, see, and well, the sunflower shower head broke when he took it off, so the massage head that came in the box should be fine. I just stood there and willed him to be done. Soon.
Long story short and eleven hundred dollars later, there was so much cutting and banging and drilling that the entire master bath and bedroom was coated with about a quarter inch of plaster and dust. All over everything. The clothes Mom wore home from the hospital and hung on a hook? Were no longer black.
We had a special raised seat brought in because when you’ve got a new hip it’s best not to bend too much at the knees. It was COATED with debris, as was the toothpaste, my robe, the rug, ohfergodssakes, everything was fucking covered in the shit. I could not believe this guy, but I wanted him done and out of the house. Even though I looked at two other pipes and agreed that they really needed replacing, I didn’t want him there any longer than necessary. He finished up, offered to give me the name of a tile guy, said we could put a little decorative tile in there and it would all be great.
Except that since two handles went down to one, more tiles were cut out on one side than on the other of the handle. And they weren’t even tiles. The entire shower enclosure was made of a single piece of fiberglass molded to look like tiles. Fire on the poop deck.
Also? I remembered why I had that rain shower head in the first place: the woman who lived here before us was about five feet tall, and the spray hit me square in the chest. I had to get one of those adjustable arms to raise it up and over so the water would come down ON me, not AT me.
Before:
After:
Sometime this week I will have to see if I can make it to the hardware store, replace the entire fixture, and find a way to cover up the hole before the Wonderboard wears out.
Or I do.
Wait. Phil says they ARE tiles. From what planet, I wonder?
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Bad Mood Dude
06.10.08 at 07:10 AM |
Aww… that sounds awful!