Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
What could possibly go wrong as Chris gets his bathroom updated?
After waiting around 20 years to get some home improvements done, we finally got round to doing it over the last couple of months, just in time to move out. I suppose we had to, or nobody from the 21st century would ever consider buying the place.
The worst room in the house by far was our bathroom, so this became our first priority. As, it seems, with everything in my life, this proved a little problematic…
Things started well enough, and indeed seemed to finish well too, with a brand new bathroom in place within a week. It looked absolutely great. The problems only started when we had the crazy idea of attempting to use it.
As I lay in our new, slightlytoo-small-for-me bath (imagine a whale in a kipper can) for the first time, the water was displaced by my mass to the very top rim of the bath. No worries, I thought, the overflow will take care of that. As I lay back and relaxed, I became aware of a sound beneath the bath not unlike that of a mighty waterfall. Which, it turned out, was exactly what it was; the overflow’s water cascading majestically down through the floorboards into our garage below.
OK, so tested new bath – flooded garage. Good start. The plumber fixed the overflow, but also decommissioned our boiler, which he said he was surprised hadn’t exploded years ago. So, boiler tested, and now sporting a very fetching CONDEMNED sticker. Two out of two.
Overnight, an uncapped pipe re-flooded the garage, which was now starting to look a lot like a swimming pool.
While I pondered what to do about it, a friend helpfully suggested just leaving it as it was and adopting a family of sea lions. I’d probably do that if our lethal cat Bodmin wasn’t so keen on seafood.
Actually, Bodmin does look a bit like that old sea lion enemy – the killer whale, apart from having no white bits… or fins… in fact, no whale features at all. Nothing like a killer whale then.
The next day, I smashed the bath panel with a hammer (of course I did). Should probably have removed it before attempting to fit the vinyl flooring around it, rather than just smashing straight through it. Standing up, I leaned on the towel rail and wrenched it off the wall. It was starting to look worse than it had before we started.
Coincidentally, after all that talk of whales and sea lions (where else would you find that in a home improvement article?), just to complete our bathroom experience, we bought a very nice ornamental whaleshaped bin for it, its open section being a huge gaping cetacean mouth. The bin’s fine, again until you start using it, at which point you become alarmed at the sight of a whale with a mouthful of empty toilet roll tubes.
Anyway, with the bathroom sorted, our next project will definitely have to be the bathroom. Again.
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