Our current president, and the most recent one, have both gone on the record promoting the idea that as many Americans as possible should be homeowners.
To which I say, are we sure about that? Because I’m not so sure that home ownership is everything it’s cracked up to be.
Do you know what home ownership is about? Well, I can sum it up in two words: toilet repair.
About 50 percent of your time as a homeowner is spent repairing or unstopping toilets. They are the most poorly engineered, badly constructed parts of any house.
The basic toilet design has gone basically unchanged for, what, a hundred years? In that time, great strides have been made in computers, televisions, space travel, and even blankets you cover up with on the couch (I desperately want a Snuggie). But there apparently has been very little research done on toilets, which are used by every one of us.
Apparently my builder got hold of some toilets that couldn’t pass inspection in Uganda, bought them at a bargain-basement price and installed them in my house. I have replaced every moving part of every toilet in my home at least 5 times. I’ve spent more time on my knees in the bathroom than George Michael.
An old favorite is the “running toilet,” in which the water continues to flow even after the flushing process. There’s a very scientific method to fixing a running toilet, known in the trade as “jiggling the handle.” Then you have the leaks, the broken handles, the bad seals, the busted seats, and the occasional overflow, which is never pretty.
I know this because I just had an upstairs toilet overflow. The kids were at home, and apparently neither of them noticed until my son thought he heard the shower running, only to discover the water he heard rushing was not from the shower, but from the CEILING FAN downstairs. The bright side is, we’re getting new ceilings, carpet, walls and paint for nothing but the deductible on the homeowners’ insurance.
The down side is, our house looks like Hitler’s bunker in the final days of the war. For three days there were giant wind machines running throughout the house trying to dry out the walls. Every time I walked downstairs and the fan hit me, I looked like I was in an Aerosmith video.
All of this has made me wish for simpler times, when the bathroom was out in a separate building in the back yard, and a man never had to worry about replacing a flapper, or a valve, or a ballcock (don’t go there). Those, my friends, were the good old days.
1 comment:
This was very funny. I love the Areosmith video comment. Your writing is so entertaining. My husband would not have handled all of that destruction as well as it sounds like you did.
Post a Comment