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5.10.02
We had a little adventure this week. We hired a couple of guys to replace the old vinyl in our bathroom floors with new white ceramic tile.
"You don't want white," Steve the Plumber had told my husband Bob. "That's like ordering vanilla when you go to Baskin Robbins."
"Yes, we do want white," I told Bob through clenched teeth, and, added, somewhat prissily, "I am not going to have my home decor dictated to me by the plumber."
When I got home from work Tuesday (I get home a few hours before Bob the Hardworking Corporate Litigator), there was a toilet in the middle of the living room. There was also a toilet in the bathtub upstairs, and a toilet in the middle of our bedroom. And there was a hole in the living room ceiling. I wasn't sure what the hole's relation to floor tiling was, exactly. Steve the Plumber's explanatory note was cheery and breezy:
No toilets tonight, folks! And the hole in the ceiling is because we replaced a joist. It was MISSING.
The capitalization seemed ominous. I had no idea what a joist was, but figured it meant that at any time in the past 18 months while soaking my troubles away in a bubblebath, I could have fallen through the ceiling and landed in the living room.
So we went out to dinner, and tried not to think about waterfalls. I came home from work Wednesday, anxious to see the grouted, completed, floors. But everything was just as we'd left it that morning. They hadn't come back.
I called Bob at work, who immediately called Steve. Steve explained that they decided the tile should dry one more day before grouting it. "Besides, I thought you had another bathroom downstairs you could use," he told Bob.
"No he didn't," I told Bob. "They went downstairs to turn off the water. They know there is no bathroom down there. Besides, his note acknowledged our lack of toilets."
But you don't want to antagonize the plumber when you have no toilets, so we went out to dinner again.
I got home from work yesterday, and everything was back-to-normal. They even seemed to have taken a bit of extra time to clean things up, and the floors are beautiful.
I don't have it in my heart to call Steve and ask why the living room curtains fell down.
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