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by Clare Siobhan
Part One: “Always try the next store.”
All we wanted were Simple Replacement Fixtures, but Home Depot didn’t have any. All they had were complete kits that required us to remove tiles and mess with pipes, and for some reason—call it a Bermuda Triangle of the mind—we decided this would be a swell project.
After banging a hole in the wall and removing the old fixtures, cutting his finger on a shard of tile in the process, my husband discovered that we lacked a certain tool (I forget which), so he trotted down to Menards, which is closer to our house, to find it.
Imagine his surprise when he discovered that Menards had exactly what we had been looking for BEFORE we demolished half our bathroom wall.
Once armed with the Simple Replacement Fixtures, the project was straightforward: replace the current fixtures, patch the wall, replace the tile. We did encounter one hitch here, in that the box of tile in our garage labeled “Beige Tile” did not actually contain Beige Tile, but Pink Tile.
Another trip to Home Depot.
That’s three so far, just to Home Depot, which includes returning the supplies for the aborted wall-demolishing project. I stopped counting the trips to Menards.
The tile available at Home Depot didn’t really match the existing tile, but we weren’t going to quibble at this point. All things considered, the hall bathroom looks pretty good.
Now for the master bathroom.
We didn’t make the mistake of immediately smashing all the tiles this time, and anyway, we had the Simple Replacement Fixtures from Menards. It was a simple matter to replace the existing fixtures with the new ones. But the shower still leaked, and tightening the porcelain “dream bathroom” handles only caused them to shatter in our hands. My husband broke one, I broke the other. (This is when I cut MY finger.)
The problem was that the washers were worn and needed to be replaced. When my husband attempted to do this, he discovered that the critical nut, that-which-had-to-be-unscrewed in order to do this blasted job, was inaccessible to any wrench we owned because the doofus who did the original job did not leave a large enough hole in the tile.
After a pause long enough to smack ourselves in the foreheads—I smacked him and he smacked me—we went back to breaking tiles, but this time with more finesse due to our new Tile Cutting Drill Bit.
We began replacing the showerhead. The strap wrench broke, making the shower unusable because my husband did manage to loosen the showerhead enough to cause the water to spray straight out the side of the nozzle rather than out the front. Eventually he went to Menards and bought a bright red pipe wrench, something along the lines of “Miss Scarlet in the Dining Room with THIS HONKIN” BIG WRENCH.”
Both bathrooms are now fully functional. Total time elapsed: three and a half weeks. Total cost: a thousand years in purgatory.
Part Two: “The Interior Torrent”
We awaken at 5:30 am to what sounds like a torrential downpour.
That’s odd. Rain in August in California?
As the fog clears we realize it’s one of our backyard automatic sprinklers spraying the outside of our bedroom wall because for some reason it’s frozen in place rather than oscillating back and forth.
My husband gets up and discovers that the sprinkler is aimed directly at our open bathroom window and is hosing down the inside of our bathroom quite nicely. Everything is soaked.
This was a much simpler problem to fix—just a little tweaking of the doodad on the sprinkler. While he was at it, he replaced another sprinkler head in the front yard that had been doing a creditable imitation of Old Faithful for several weeks.
Part Three: “I refuse to give birth at Home Depot”
I’ve been in labor with our third child since 4 am. The two older kids are outside running in the sprinkler, and the contractions on this muggy summer afternoon finally feel like they’re getting somewhere.
We call the babysitter and prepare to go to the hospital.
Not a minute later, for some unfathomable reason—another Bermuda Triangle of the mind?—our five-year-old son suddenly takes an interest in a section of capped-off water pipe sticking out of the side of the house. He puts his foot on it and stands on it, impressed with his own sense of balance.
Before one of us can say, “Don’t stand on that, it might break,” it breaks, and water issues forth from it like the very fluid from the amniotic sac of a laboring elephant, except that it doesn’t stop.
Did I mention that I’m approaching transition labor as we gape at this spectacle, knowing instantly that our third child will not be brought into this world without a trip to Home Depot?
This labor—which we had been coaxing along all day with back-rubs, showers, and poetry reading—is now going full bore.
And my husband is gone. At the hardware store.
I actually have very little recollection of what happened from this point on. I stood out in the backyard alternately watching the gushing pipe and my watch, when suddenly my husband appeared out of the haze as if in a dream. He disappeared to the back of the house and shut off the water main.
When he reappeared, he assured me that if he couldn’t fix this in ten minutes, he’d explain very calmly to the babysitter why they wouldn’t be flushing any toilets that day, and we’d go.
Ten minutes?
That’s ten contractions, my good man. Visions of giving birth in the car assisted by a gas station attendant swim through my head.
Then he crouched, surreally, next to the broken pipe, with the HONKIN’ BIG WRENCH again, plumber’s putty, a new cap for the pipe.
Happily, he was able to cap off the pipe and we left our household with fully functional toilets, to give birth, two hours later, to our youngest child.
When we called the babysitter, she congratulated us warmly and informed us that she had to pan-fry the planned dinner (pigs-in-a-blanket) because the oven had made this weird clicking sound and then gone pffffffssssst.
Sigh.
(This is a silly piece, reminiscences from my married days. The first one reminds me why I tend not to take on these kinds of projects anymore, the second why I’m happy just lugging a hose and sprinkler around the yard, and the third just makes me and my children laugh at the comedy of errors associated with Number Two Daughter’s birth.)
