Sometimes Blessings Come From The Most Unexpected Sources

The Captain was loaded in the back seat of the van, buckled into her booster seat next to two eight-foot 1 x 4 framing boards. Just as I was sliding closed the side door I heard her pre-school teacher behind me say, “Uh-oh, dad has wood in the car. He’s up to something.” My head whipped around and I shot Mrs. K a look that made her jump. I didn’t mean to. It just sorta popped out of me.

“Oh, you don’t want go there,” I said.

Mrs. K laughed. We’ve known each other for over a year and we get along very well. “That bad?”” she asked.

“It started with a simple plan. We wanted to remove old paneling in a basement bathroom and replace it with sheet rock.”

“Okay…” she smiled.

“And once you start removing old paneling you start uncovering problems, like corroded pipes and poorly run plumbing lines. So you have to replace them.”

She nodded her head in understanding.

“And then your wife decides that she wants to move the sink to a new wall. That will require running new water lines, I told her. And she said, ‘So?’”

Mrs. K laughed. “Uh-oh.”

“So I moved the plumbing lines. And re-ran the electricity. Now that the sheet rock is almost finished, the wife looked at the floor and told me that the old tile had to be removed before the new tile could be put down. But that means that I have to pull up the toilet, I told her. ‘And your point is?’ my wife replied. So, I am pulling up the toilet.”

I shared all of this with a smile. It was a friendly conversation where Mrs. K laughed at my expense and I didn’t really mind. The Boss and I have debated how to go about this rehab project. We both have good reasons for our ideas. Rather than expanding upon them it might be better to write that this project would have been easier if I had planned on gutting the bathroom and starting from scratch.

Today I am pulling up the toilet, removing old floor tile, and hanging the final piece of sheet rock. Tonight the Boss installs the new floor tile and I get to re-install the toilet. Woo-hoo! We know how to live it up around here!

Blogging about this project produced an unexpected blessing. Councilman Newfangled, my friend who ran for Apathy mayor last year, called last night and offered me a very nice vanity that he took out of one of his bathrooms. Both he and his wife are regular Bedlam readers. When he read of my bathroom woes he called to offer up the vanity, which he wants out of his garage. We’ll use it in one of the upstairs bathrooms, both of which will be remodeled before we put this house on the market. Sometimes blessings come from the most unexpected sources.