Wednesday, December 16, 2009

My Shower Saga

I would like to begin by stating that I am not addicted to coffee. I might enjoy a good, strong cup, but I don't need it to get me going. What I DO need to get me going each and every morning is a nice, warm shower. I can't explain it, but the day just doesn't seem to go as well if I don't get that shower first thing in the morning.

That being said, imagine my surprise/horror/anxiety when we discovered that the bathroom that my husband and I would be using in our new house DID NOT have a shower. It has a nice blue tub, but I am not a tub person, and so, after having a mild panic attack, my husband assured me that we could probably find an attachment that would make the tub into a shower.

In the meantime I would have my choice of the nice shower in the girls' room (which is really the master bath but because it is only a three bedroom house, we had to put all the girls in the master bedroom which gives them the nice, big master bath with the big closets and the double sinks and the nice shower....but I digress...) OR I could choose to go down to the basement (the unfinished part, mind you) and take a shower in the very primitive looking, campground type cement shower stall.

Fast forward to the first morning that we woke up in our new home. It was a Sunday and we had just spent the previous two days working very hard from sun-up to sun-down moving our belongings (can you feel my pain yet?) As I rose from my bed, still unsure of my surroundings, I ventured down the hall to that nice master bath to take my nice, warm shower. As the water ran, and ran, and ran and NEVER even got close to being warm, I started to panic again. I quickly came to the conclusion that something was wrong and there just wasn't going to be any hot water coming out of that faucet no matter how long I stood there.

Okay, time to calm down and assess my options: a bath in the blue bathtub, or a warm shower in the cement stall in the basement. HMM, I decided to go for the cement stall, only to find out that since that shower drains into the sump pit and, for some unknown reason the sump pump wasn't working, I couldn't take a shower down there unless I wanted to flood that portion of the basement.

That meant my only option was the tub. Knowing there are far worse things in life than taking a bath, I ventured forth into the blue bathroom to fill the tub, only to find that the thing that plugs the drain didn't work. Indisposed, and totally fed up at that point to bother with finding anything to plug the tub with, I opted for sitting there with the water running and my foot over the opening so that I could keep some semblance of water in the tub.

The final blow to my morning ritual was when I discovered that my new bathroom doesn't have an electrical outlet anywhere in the bathroom! The man who built this house was an electrician - there are literally hundreds of switches and outlets in this house - but there is NOT ONE OUTLET IN THE BATHROOM! What was the man thinking?

Now you are probably thinking, "What's the big deal?" but if you're a morning coffee drinker, you know, the kind who depends on that first cup of coffee in order to even be able to open an eye, imagine getting up to find that your coffee maker broke and you had to get in your car and DRIVE somewhere to get your coffee!

Don't worry, however, things have improved and I've developed a workable routine. We got the shower fixed in the girls' bathroom, so I shower in there, go to the blue bathroom to dress and blow-dry my hair in a third bathroom. While it is not perfect, it is certainly doable and has been a good lesson in detachment :)


2 comments:

  1. Oh, I know exactly what you are talking about with routines getting messed up. Glad you found something workable.

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  2. Laura This was soooooo painful to read. I'm glad it's now worked out. For whatever it's worth, I don't have a bathroom. Since we all get up approx. the same time for Mass in the morning, I bounce from "our" bathroom to the girls' bathroom to the powder room. And, yes, as you well know, I need that cup of coffee in the morning.

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