Tag Archives: toilet

No Place Like Home

My children come from a broken home.

Literally.

Our home is broken. 

The microwave doesn’t micro any waves.  The glass stovetop is held together with duct tape.  The washing machine sounds like a freight train, and it costs less to buy a new one than it would to repair this poor thing that has lived such a hard life.

All but one of us uses the guest bathroom to shower because the master bath is almost exactly the same as it was in 1964, except no longer new and shiny.  Try old and nasty.  We did change the toilet to a Toto many years ago, since the company’s claim it could flush a golf ball erroneously made us think it could handle this family’s output.  Toto toilets have different insides than the standard chain and valve toilet.  There is some sort of plastic tube shaped gadget that is responsible for the flushing.  Something is wrong with ours because when you flush it, it sounds like a fog horn, and is just about as loud.  Or maybe it’s just howling in distress.

Six people using the tiny guest bath with poor ventilation has led to the entire bathroom rusting.  The faucet handles are rusted and can’t be removed without breaking the porcelain.  Same for the pipes that lead from the wall to the pedestal sink.  All around the edges of the medicine cabinet mirror is, you guessed it, rust.  The bathroom window is cockeyed and the seal broken between the double panes, so there is something funky living in that space between.  However, it is very easy to open if you forget your keys and need to break in.  I can attest to that personally. 

There are two pocket doors in the house but the tracks to both were broken years ago by boys roughhousing.  Since fixing them means cutting into the sheetrock to replace the tracks, the doors remain stuck forever between the walls.

I don’t have enough chairs to seat people at the kitchen table even if the table were available for seating.  The matching wooden chairs broke one by one over the years, and then most of the folding chairs.  In the living room, our lovely sofa made it through three cats until Toby came along and shredded it to pieces.  I keep covering the shred with a throw blanket, and the should-be-grown kids keep pulling it down to use as a lap blanket, and never replace it.  The matching chair started to fray at the arms and someone who refuses to confess picked at it until all the stuffing is exposed.

In the family room, the sliding glass door has no handle.  There’s a finger sized whole where the handle should be that works great for opening and closing, unless you have sausage fingers.  Then you have a problem.  The lock is a 2×4 cut to just the right length to fit behind the closed glass pane.

The box spring on my bed has also been shredded to pieces by my fat cat, and the mattress has a Jerry-sized valley on one side.  I cuddle up to my husband at night but then I roll downhill into his valley and can’t get out.  It’s safer to stay on my side. 

The decay has spread from major installed appliances to small appliances.  I took out our blender when preparing desserts a couple of days before Thanksgiving, and it was broken.  I bought a new one at Best Buy, but the motor burned up as soon as I plugged it in.  And it didn’t even blend first.  Thanksgiving morning, our trusty coffee maker wouldn’t make any coffee.  The green light came on but the machine moved no water.  I ended up boiling water and pouring it slowly through the filter. 

We had so many plans for this fixer of a house when we bought it almost 20 years ago.  We fixed some things right away, but those things now need to be fixed again.  Five kids and years of crisis after crisis have taken their toll on the house and on our finances (not to mention our psyches, but that’s another story).  No repairs are in sight.

My kids don’t care; they have friends over with no shame.  But me?  If you come to my door, I’m going to block your entry.  We can chat on the porch.

I know it’s all surface nonsense.  The roof is sound, thanks to my dad paying for a new one once we could see daylight when we looked up in the attic.  The walls are solid and the doors all close (well, except the pocket doors).   

This house has raised three kids which became five, seen the birth of a child, four high school graduations (fifth pending, he’s a senior), been home to many beloved pets, and witnessed untold laughter, tears, celebrations and arguments. 

It’s been a home.  And really, what more could I ask?

The Commode’s Its Abode

I believe we have a poltergeist living in our toilets.  There is no other explanation for the irritating, yet overall harmless happenings associated with using our loo, except coincidence, and everybody knows there is no real coincidence.  After seven years in this home, and endless aggravation from the porcelain, I am forced to come to the conclusion that there is some other life force responsible.

 Oh, I see that skeptic look on your face.  I know what you’re thinking.  “She’s a nutter.”  Maybe so, but as long as you’re still reading, I’ll explain.

At first, we thought we had moved into a house with the worst plumbing imaginable.  The toilets were endlessly clogging and overflowing.  We must have had Roto-Rooter, Rescue Rooter,  Pooter Rooter, and every other rooter out here a million times, and they could never find a reason for the constant blockages.  Well, one time there was a plastic Barney stuck in the toilet, but other than that one episode, they just kept telling us to use less paper. 

So we made some adjustments.  To begin, we do a preliminary test flush, to make sure there is no unseen clog.  Then, when we’ve done our thing, we flush again, before using paper.  With each piece of paper in the water, we must flush.  California is always suffering a drought, and this seems like a terrible waste of water, but what choice is there? 

Fighting back, we bought the toilet that’s supposed to be the mother of all toilets, the Toto.  Supposedly this sucker flushes golf balls without a problem.  Now whatever you might say about any of us being full of you-know-what, we are not full of anything as solid as a golf ball.

But would you believe it?  That mother clogs all the time.  And it’s not in the pipes under the house, it’s the toilet itself! 

I know, you’re not convinced, but there’s more.  Every time I take a doo doo, the phone rings.  No, really!  At first I thought it was just Murphy’s law, but honestly, after seven years of pooping and ringing, I’m at a loss for any other explanation.  It seems my taking a poop makes the phone ring.  I don’t know how our resident mischief maker does it, but it’s really kind of creepy. 

Then there is the electronic scale.  Normally, all other things equal, if you drop a few good ones, you unload at least a pound, wouldn’t you say?  Not here.  I’m not kidding.  In our house, if you let loose and then weigh yourself, you will weigh 3-4 pounds more than you did before going.  Honestly, it’s true, and it happens to all of us, not just me! 

So what else am I to believe?  There’s something rotten in our toilets, and it’s not biological.  Something does not like our solid waste, and it makes no bones about it! 

It’s really unclear why anything, even a mischievous spirit, would want to hang out there, but I don’t believe we are the first to have this experience.  After all, J.K. Rowlings had Moaning Myrtle living in the girls lav in the Harry Potter books, and where do you think she got that idea?  Came up with it all by herself?  Did you know that a quick google showed most cities have a J.K. Plumbing?  Another coincidence?  I think not.  She’s had personal experience! 

I’m not sure how to get rid of a poltergeist in the toilet.  We are probably just going to have to live with it, and I suppose there are worse things that could be wrong with your house.  There are certainly more expensive things.  But I wonder about what it will do to our home’s value, if we ever decide to sell.  Don’t you have to disclose everything that’s wrong with your home when you put it on the market?  How do you tell your realtor that there’s an unearthly trouble maker in your toilet?  

On the other hand, who’s going to sue?  “Your honor, the previous owners knew about the bogey in the toilet.!” 

C’mon, what kind of nutter’d believe that?

Metaphor for Life

I’m changing my address from the nice suburban street where I now live to “Van, Down by the River”.  By rights, that’s what it should be, because although we have steadily been updating our older home, and have added some lovely features, at heart we remain urban hillbillies. 

Our front yard is tastefully landscaped.  We live very near the local elementary school, and many parents who pass our house going to and from the school have commented on our garden.  Oh, if they could only see what lies beyond.  The backyard is a combination of wasteland and landfill.  The automatic lawn sprinklers died years ago, replaced by an ineffective hose sprinkler that is powered by a manual timer called “Whenever I Remember”.  Thus it’s green under the mulberry tree in the corner, brown around the edges, and yellow in the middle, except for the patches of healthy local grasses (i.e., weeds) that pop up here and there.  Beyond the grass is dirt, highlighted by a dilapidated play structure that we have officially condemned, a rather nice raised vegetable box where my husband practices his unfulfilled farming urges, rotten tree stumps, and a contrasting well-groomed line of roses up against the house.  

On the side near the gate is the “basketball court”.  It is a slab of cement with a nice backboard at one end, but it also houses the garbage cans, a barbecue, and a toilet.  Makes for a pretty interesting game of hoops.  The toilet was removed in an effort to find a more powerful model that could accommodate both my husband’s voluminous output and our home’s crappy (pun intended) plumbing..  To replace it we found the mother of all toilets, which has only succumbed once to the plumbing, but unfortunately the cast-off has no place to go.  It’s not a bad toilet, either, and only a couple of years old.  Where do unemployed toilets go to look for work?  

But the pièce de résistance is the patio.  Ah yes, the patio.  The terrace.  The veranda.  The cracked aggregate concrete housing weeds, insects, a lopsided cheerful yellow patio set, stray toys, more roses, and the couch.  Yes, I said “couch”.  Doesn’t every nice home have a sofa on the veranda?  We did have a leather armchair as well, but that went to a new owner for $30 in a garage sale.  

The couch is a casualty of redecorating.  Five years ago it was deep blue, plush, ultra comfy, and seemingly well built.  Today it is threadbare and stained, with broken springs popping up between the cushions, all complements of the Kea children.  I dragged it out the sliding glass door to the patio the day the new furniture arrived.  Although I regularly shifted it to sweep and mop underneath, as I heaved it toward the door, left behind was a trail of crumbs, wrappers, plastic arms disconnected from some long lost superhero, marbles, popsicle sticks, and numerous other sticky detritus.  Apparently the sofa had been gobbling this debris for years, only to regurgitate in its death throws.  To add insult to injury, since moving it to it’s “temporary” spot, we’ve had our first rain.  

So in keeping with the image, we have a dead, moldy, decomposing sofa on our patio.  Do you know how hard it is to get rid of a yucky sofa?  It’s too far gone to give to the poor.  The local dump wants $125 to leave it there.  Which actually I’d be willing to pay if my husband and I could lift the damn thing down our steep driveway and into the truck, but we’ve already tried and failed.   So we are stuck with the only other option, which is to pay a hauling company $225 to take it away for us.   I guess we might as well add another $100 for the poor toilet.  

My husband, who was born and raised in the deep south, had another suggestion.  He’s very sensitive about redneck comments, feeling stuck up Californians look down upon his pan fried roots.  But seeing he’s sort of an “in your face” kind of guy, he is lobbying for moving the sofa and toilet to the front lawn, lighting a bonfire with one of the broken chairs from the garage, and sitting back to enjoy a Bud Lite.  He’d probably suggest having a shotgun at his knee, but I don’t allow firearms.  

He’s only joking (I think).  He doesn’t even like Bud Lite.  He likes expensive scotch.  Actually, I think he just likes to brag that he likes expensive scotch.  Anyway, the presence of a sofa outside our sliding glass doors seems to bother him less than the lawn needing to be mowed, or the condition of his lettuce crop.  I, on the other hand, am mortified.  After years of fearing guests because the inside of our home was so frightening, now I fear guests because they might see the outside.  No matter what I do, I cannot seem to keep up with the feculence of life.  “Feculence”…isn’t that a great word?  I found it in a thesaurus as a synonym for “excrement”.    

Perhaps we should keep the toilet, then, as a symbol of our struggles.  A literal symbol for my husband, more figurative for me.  Maybe my husband can plant a crop there.  And you can interpret that any way you like.