vituperation

I was going to do a whole entry of pictures of our nice new floors today, but I left my dang camera out at Smallville.

Below are a couple of pictures I snapped from the front and back doors when we were out there to pay for the floors on Thursday. The floor guys did a stunningly good job, and the main guy is easily the most conscientious person I’ve ever had do any work for me. He called almost every night to check in and tell us what he did, wanting to know if we’d been out to look and what we thought so far. He even told us Thursday that if we scuffed up the floor while we finished renovating to just give him a call before we moved in and he’d come out and fix it up for us.

A very pleasant experience, it was, and he’ll get nothing but good references from us.

English chestnut, on pine in the kitchen.

And on oak in the front room.

Perhaps, though, you’d rather hear how it happened that the camera is still out in Smallville tonight…

I crouched in the bathtub, staring at the faucet hardware while I tried to figure out how to take it out. I’d been all over it, above, below, and around the sides, looking for screws holding the hot and cold water knobs on, as well as the part where the water comes out. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

The floors are done and it’s time to finish the bathrooms, you see. That means getting everything out, including the cheap plastic faux tile panels that the previous owners put up in lieu of real tiled shower walls. Removing the plastic panels should be a piece of cake…once the faucet hardware is removed. I’d started with lofty goals: a few minutes to prep the bathroom, an hour or so to paint, then I could go outside and test my idea for a portable chicken pen.

Now, after ten minutes of searching and head scratching in the tub, I was stumped. Time to check with the expert.

“Hey,” I said when my dad answered the phone. “I’m having a helluva time taking out the bathtub faucet. Is there some secret to it? I was expecting an Allen screw or something on the bottom of each piece, holding it on, but I can’t find squat.”

After much discussion, I learned I’d actually been right in my initial guess about the spigot (the whole thing screws off), and right in my third or fourth idea about the handles (the “H” and “C” on the knobs are actually popout buttons that reveal screws once you pry them up, but I hadn’t tried hard enough to pop them out the first time). Pleased that I knew the answer, I hung up.

In short order I’d removed the hardware and thrown it away. I unscrewed the showerhead and pitched it, too, then took down the medicine cabinet and towel rod. Finally, it was time to remove the hideous fake tile panels.

With a mighty grunt, I peeled the plastic off the wall. It fought with me a little, and left plenty of silicone behind, but victory ultimately was mine. Not surprisingly, the previous owners hadn’t bothered painting the wall underneath. Turns out the bathroom was originally white.

I grabbed the scraper and took it to the crusty silicone that dotted the old beadboard. As I scraped, my attention was drawn to the stems for the two faucets. I realized I hadn’t finished taking everything off. They still had some hardware on them, a decorative stainless steel sleeve that would clash with the brushed nickel replacements we bought Friday night at Lowe’s.

And God forbid the faucet stem clash with the handle.

I grabbed the stainless cover and tugged on it, figuring it would slide off. It didn’t budge, and I realized it was screwed on. Made sense, I suppose. That would hold it in place, keep it from rattling around.

I rummaged through my toolbox until I found my adjustable pliers. I fidgeted with them until they fit around the stem and began to loosen it, idly thinking about how good the new fixtures and tile were going to make the bathroom—

With a loud pop like a bottle of bubbly, the faucet stem exploded off the pipe and directly into my knee. In less than a second I was soaked from head to toe. The water roared like a raging river.

I tried very briefly to stem the flow with my finger, but that was an exercise in futility.

SHUTOFF GET TO THE SHUTOFF FOR GODS SAKE GET TO

In my mind’s eye I saw myself at the entrance to the crawlspace with the home inspector. Saw him pointing to a twisty little thing on a piece of flex pipe hanging from a joist.

“There’s a water shutoff,” he said. “That’s pretty nice. You can shut the water off without having to go out to the meter.”

I leapt out of the bathtub and galloped down the hall, chased by the roar of the water. As I rounded the corner into the kitchen, I saw Robyn turning away from the sink to gawp at me.

“MOVE!” I roared as I went by.

Why’d you tell her to move? She wasn’t in the way.

Through the laundry room and to the back door.

You shouldn’t have yelled at her. She’s going to be mad at you for that.

Twisting at the deadbolt, I called back over my shoulder, “I don’t know why I told you to move, cause you weren’t in the way.”

That’s me. Courteous even in a crisis.

I raced out the door and down the steps. Behind me, I heard Robyn run through the laundry room, like she was chasing me. The frozen ground crunched underfoot as I ran. At the crawlspace, I thumbed back the barrel bolt, wrenched open the hatch, and dove into the musty dark.

I twisted the shutoff.

Back into the house as fast as I could go, calling out “did it stop?” as I went.

Robyn was outside the bathroom, dropping towels right and left. A stream was running through the hall, against the right-side wall because that’s the way the floor slopes, headed for the bottom of the stairs. I grabbed some towels and started soaking it up.

As we cleaned, we had a BIG laugh over Robyn’s perception of the initial situation, when I ran into the kitchen, but you’ll have to wait for her to write about that.

Together, we got the vast majority of the water up in a few minutes, with no damage to the floors. While Robyn went over the floors again with paper towels to get every last drop, I settled in on the edge of the tub to try and put the faucet stem back on.

After my third attempt at sticking the stem back into the pipe, I laughed softly to myself.

“What?” Robyn asked.

“My hands are shaking so bad from the adrenaline I can’t even get the piece back into the pipe.”

to be continued…