Tuesday, July 25, 2006

All The Small Things

Life has been chaotic recently. Lots of stuff combining to make daily living more difficult than usual. And, of course, that means more for me to whine about. You lucky readers!

The shower.

For starters, the shower is about 14 years old, and the fixtures weren't highest quality at the time. They were good quality, and a good value, and apparently had a life span of exactly! 14 years! The initial symptoms were a lowering of water pressure, and a tendency for the spray to angle off in different directions. The terminal symptoms were a failure of most of the jets, and a spiritless drooling of water from the edges. It was like trying to shower under a teething baby, with an occasional loogie hawk for variety.

So--time for a new shower head.

But! It couldn't be easy! Because! In the intervening fourteen years, brass bathroom fixtures have become passe. Dated even. Restoration Hardware doesn't even carry ANYTHING in polished brass anymore. The local home stores had only a couple of chintzy pieces--nothing that was a well made or acceptable as what was failing back at home.

Time for a special order.

So--Mr. Sweetie and I went to Home Depot (TM) too look for a showerhead. Preferably one with a modicum of antique charm for our 115 year old house. We found one--with holes like a watering can and not nipples like a power washer--and ordered it. "It should be there by Monday" I was told by the nice lady who took my order on Thursday.

Nope.

By Wednesday--with no showerhead--I called. "Yes, the one warehouse was out, so they had to ship it from another warehouse. What can I say?" It arrived on Thursday--so not the 3 days later I had been expecting. Mr. Sweetie and his plumbing buddy the Bunny went up to install it. At 9 p.m.

Yup--you guessed it. The parts didn't fit each other, plus the design was so bad that the water actually backed up out of the showerhead itself and ran back out the arm and down the wall. You couldn't actually get anymore water out of it than we were getting from the one we were replacing.

So--return badly designed showerhead and back to special order. Wait a week. Again. In the interim, the old showerhead was so useless that we took showers in the bathtub. Huzzah for bathtub faucet with telephone style hand shower!

Meanwhile.

Meanwhile, construction continues on all the street in our neighborhood. Old lead water supply lines are being removed, and new curbs and sidewalk being installed. Then streets being paved. No street parking allowed, and a ginormous trench built at the end of the driveway so off-street parking is not an option either. We found ourselves parking farther and farther away, climbing over piles of dirt and holes in the sidewalk to get to and from the car. Complicated by the fact that you never knew from one day to the next what street would be totally blocked by enormous excavations--heavy construction equipment, seven foot high dirt piles, with correspondingly deep holes.

Into all this disruption, it becomes obvious that it is time to replace our disintegrating concrete front steps. They have always been an eyesore--too large for the scale of the house, and resolutely charmless. Many many, MANY years of temporary patches and repairs (going back easily 40 years or more) have finally failed, and so Mr. Sweetie got himself a rental jackhammer and took them down.

So, to recap: no shower*. No street. No sidewalk. No stairs. Construction everywhere. Fine film of dirt settling on all horizontal surfaces.

What would you do in these circumstances? That's right--re-decorate a bedroom! Remove all the furniture, take apart the window to repair and paint, remove all light sources and ceiling fans! Paint the room--and halfway through find out that the Bunny (whose room it is) has buyer's remorse and doesn't want to change after all!

So--half the stuff in her bedroom is now in her sister's room, where Bunny is also sleeping. The rest of the stuff is in the hallway. The walls are edged, but only half painted. The room is a hangover-inducing mix of blue, pink and green.

So! How is your summer?


*Okay--I must give credit where credit is due. Mr. Sweetie installed the (second) new showerhead the day it arrived--one week later--and it is wonderful. It pays to buy known brand names. Thank you Kohler! And Mr. Sweetie!

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