Bad Bathrooms

One of Charlie’s friends comes over to borrow the tile saw.  “I had to redo my girlfriend’s bathroom,” he says.  “It was so bad I wouldn’t use it.”

“Bad like what?” I ask.  Now I’m interested.  If there’s a disgusting bathroom and someone wants to talk about it, I’m in.  I love to hear about people living in disgusting places.  How tough are you?  Do you have squirrels playing behind the toilet like we did last year?  Is it worse than a gas station restroom?  Tell me more.  I can take it.

“It’s a regular 1960s house,” he says.  “The vanity countertop was laminate, trimmed in chrome.  That’s bad enough, but someone painted it gray.  Touch it and you scratch off the paint.

“I decided it had to go and took it out.  Someone kicked out a hole in the wall.  Instead of replacing the drywall, they stuffed it full of newspapers, duct taped over and spackled on top.  I poked around with my hammer, afraid of what I’d find.  I thought it was a huge rat’s nest.  Luckily, it was just twenty year-old newspapers.”

Twenty year-old newspapers sound clean compared to the toilet we’ve had in the upstairs bathroom.  In its old age, it didn’t understand the way things were supposed to flow.  It liked to reject more than it flushed.  We stopped using it, and more importantly, cleaning it, when Charlie installed the toilet downstairs.

Charlie seemed happy to remove it.  Now there’s a hole in the floor which makes the toilet smell floral by comparison.  I wondered how he could work in there until I noticed he’d covered the hole with the current issue of National Geographic Traveller, which I hadn’t finished reading.  I have now.

When he pulled off the 33 year old cheap vanity, he called me over to have a look.  “Look at this drywall.  It’s like oatmeal,” he said.  Oatmeal doesn’t smell like 33 years of dry rot mixed with mold.  It smells like horse stables mixed with old standing water.  I made an excuse and ran off to the other side of the house.

A little while later, Charlie called me back.  “Look,” he said.  “You can stick your finger through the floor.  The sink must have been leaking for years.”

He pulled his finger out of the floor and looked at it closely.  It was covered in wet, brown cakey stuff.  Is this procedure necessary? 

“I expected ordinary wet ply strands of plywood,” he said.  “Don’t tell me they put particle board under here.”

Even I know particle board swells up and turns to goo when it gets wet.  Charlie called Kevin, his contractor buddy and our sometime sub.  When you find treasure like this, you want to share. 

“Everywhere else is sub-floor, 5/8” plywood,” he told Kevin.  “Under the sink and toilet, I discovered they put a 2’ by 6’ sheet of particle board.”

“They must have run out,” Kevin said.  “And they must have been high, or not paid very well.”

After several more comments like, “I can’t believe somebody did that,” and, “Whoever built this house didn’t know what they were doing,” Charlie hung up and prepared for another trip to Home Depot. 

A little help? [] 11:56:48 PM