plumb

Daisy hasn't thrown up since 6 this morning, and, trapped at home with an increasingly well child (thank God), I am getting housework done. The kitchen is clean, ready to sweep and mop. The living room is organized well enough to vacuum in a few minutes. The front hall, some stuff is put away. Steps are swept. Beds are made. Bathroom is tidy and I'm soaking the shower walls in a solution to hopefully pull the scale off without killing us all with the fumes.

I went downstairs with a load of laundry to complete this tidy day, and noticed the freezer door's inventory sheet hadn't been updated in a long time. Every time I take something out, I scratch it off the piece of paper on the door. Deer sausage, chicken broth, whatever. And when I add things to the freezer--bacon, frozen peas, etc--I add them to the list. This way I can stand there and look at the sheet and make decisions without defrosting everything and digging around. It also means that every six months when I take the sheet down, I look at the stuff that was originally written (in another color) and know I should get to using that first. I rewrite the list and continue. But if Fiona runs down for chicken stock for me, she doesn't scratch anything off.

Ladida, I'm rewriting and annotating my new list, feeling so industrious and organized, and I glance at the floor. It's wet. This is the laundry room, where the drain is, and sometimes it is a bit wet from the air conditioner hose, but not like this. And not from this direction. It's leading into the utility room, so named because the electric box is there. Inside the room, about the size of a small walk in closet, the wall in front of me is shiny and drenched. Oh no. It hasn't rained, it's not a leak from outdoors, but what it is has something to do with the bathroom right above it, the old butler's pantry that was poorly converted when the house was a boarding house in the 1940s-1970s. We recently got it cleaned up enough to use it again as a second bathroom, with the hope of taking out the old makeshift shower and rearranging the toilet and getting a new sink, come this summer. And now something horrible was happening.

I run upstairs and sure enough, there is water on the floor behind the toilet. The supply line is leaking. After an SOS call to my parents, I manage to find the cold water shut off valve on the pipe downstairs that leads to the bathroom. I flush the toilet one last time to empty the tank. Then I observe a bit. It's the seal, I think, between the supply line and the tank hardware. The bathroom was unused for so long, I bet the rubber washers have cracked.

Yet another horrible disgusting thing left for me to fix by the woman who owned our house post-boarding house. Her mother ran the boarding house, so it's all Murphy-Chapman, either way. Fifty years of screwing things up. I take a deep breath, call my mother-in-law to see if Jake's dad will be able to talk him through this, and we both decide yes. He might talk me through it, frankly, now that I've looked online briefly and see that this is a common problem and probably easily fixed.

But in a 107 year old house, with a 60 year old slapdash plumbing scheme, that hasn't really ever had a good once-over with a scrub brush under and behind the toilet?

Time for more coffee and some sewing, don't you think? It's not leaking anymore and the hardware store is not far away. Tomorrow...is another day.