The Story Of The Rock 'N Roll Toilet

So a few words about toilets.

The toilet that was in the house was a beautiful old pink toilet. We weren't exactly sure when it was from but it was from a ways back.

It was also giant bitch of a toilet. It took about ten minutes to fill after you flushed it. It was like riding around in a pink ceramic Cadillac.

As renters, we never had to think about water rates or water bills or anything about the water other than we were entitled to it.

As homeowners, every time we flushed that bitch of a toilet we thought about the water bill — and the longer it took to refill — every 30 or 40 seconds (or ten minutes) of listening to water drain, drain, drain into the tank — the more it shook you to your very core.

But like I said, it was a beautiful pink toilet. Of course the lid was cracked in two, and there was the slightest hairline fracture in the bowl itself, which, if you didn't clean the toilet for a few days, developed just a hint of a funk-mold hairline that waved in the current when the toilet flushed. Which is to say, we probably needed to replace the toilet.

Now when you get to replace a toilet there's a certain thrill in shopping for the most water efficient model ever created. You study the liters-per-flush stats and it just kills you how fucking green you are being. It hurts.

The only thing with buying a new toilet is that there are only three colors they really make: white, off-white and black. With our pink and black tiles, that left us just one real choice — black. The rock 'n roll toilet.

When it came to paint colors, I deferred entirely to Jen. When it comes to most style decisions, I defer to her. But for some reason I was really adamant about having a rock n' roll toilet. It just looked so correct. So that's what we did. We bought a rock n' roll toilet. And a rock n' roll toilet seat to go with our rock n' roll toilet.

The other thing that was sweet: You can buy a toilet on Amazon and they will deliver a toilet to your house. I don't know how we would have done it otherwise.

How hard is it to install a toilet? Like everything else — negotiating real estate, pruning rose bushes, raising children — you Google it. It's pretty straightforward, though I did have to go to more than one place to find a flange — the thingy that attaches to the subfloor that holds on the toilet itself (what those two bolts at the bottom do).

That said, there is the issue of the wax ring. If you've never unhooked a toilet from the floor, the wax ring is a ring of wax that globs together the toilet pedestal to the flange and seals the waste line from the rest of the bathroom. The only tricky thing about the wax ring is that after you glob it to the bottom you don't really see it once you set the toilet on the floor — so there's really only one shot to get it right. After it's on there, it's hidden from view for as long as you want to ignore it.

There's nothing like the feeling of accomplishment after installing a toilet and flushing it for the first time. And not seeing water seep out from the bottom of the base of it after you do so.

There is of course an irony in installing a water-efficient toilet: You (meaning I) are (am) much less likely to "let anything mellow" on the theory that you're never really wasting water with a water-efficient toilet. It's the kind of perverse logic that says that bicyclists and football players are safer without helmets.

I couldn't bear to part with the pink toilet completely, so I convinced Jen that we should install it in the backyard as a planter, as a way of sort of respecting the history of Kawama. It's not the ideal thing to plant stuff in — but not because of what you're thinking. Rather, a toilet is designed to hold water in the bowl, which means that it doesn't really drain correctly, which means that it kind of sucks as a planter. The stuff we had growing in there this summer did OK (a fern and some leftover hosta plants that were in the backyard when we moved in), but I don't know that we'll plant, say, herbs in there anytime soon. Like I said, drainage issues — plus, it's kind of gross to think about anyway. This isn't the best image — it's actually from August on the day before the hurricane/tropical storm hit when it was really raining — but you can see what we did:

In the end, I finally figured out when the bathroom dates from — it turns out that every toilet bowl basically has a date stamp. So this one says (if I can make it out correctly) "Nov 29 1965." Which means it was made the Monday after Thanksgiving in 1965:

That makes sense when you look at the décor of the bathroom — it's basically 1960s. Our rock n' roll toilet has a date stamp of sometime in March of 2011 (I forgot to take a picture of it before I installed the toilet).

Like They Tell The Bagger At The Checkout Line, If You Find Space, Fill It . . .

We first discovered Jen was with child while we were out of state visiting family. Jen took the test first thing in the morning and bounded out of the bathroom in the guest room.

My first thought was something along the lines of, "Holy moly, that was quick."

It was too soon to tell anyone, even the family, or so we assumed, so we tried going about the day not saying anything. I convinced Jen that even if people were suspicious, no one would dare ask.

This worked well for about half a day or so.

One thing we were aware of was that a baby's organs develop in the first part of a pregnancy, which means that it's important not to use alcohol during this critical stage. It's kind of a tricky thing, that, because unless you are "trying" trying to get pregnant, you're probably drinking.

Suffice it to say, Jen knew that she couldn't be drinking now. Which is all well and good, but unless you're hanging out with George W. Bush — or Mitt Romney, I guess — alcohol is all around. Suffice it to say, covers would be blown sooner or later.

Like sooner. We went to eat that night and the restaurant was behind when we arrived for our reservation, so they sent out a round of sparkling wine as a gesture of good will. Jen sort of barely sipped hers, and I ended up finishing it.

When it came time to choose the wine, everyone of course turned to Jen. Jen had just got her advanced certificate in wine and spirits studies. She picked out a bottle of wine, then refused a glass when the server returned with the bottle.

"Is there something you want to tell us?" Mom asked.

We hemmed and hawed and denied anything, which seemed to "work" in the sense that the line of questioning ceased. Jen then proceeded to check her phone for low-mercury fish.

So the lesson we learned on the first day was not to refuse the glass. Instead, always accept the glass, and allow me to drink it, as slyly as possible. I basically spent the first trimester drinking for two. Friends informed us later that we fooled absolutely no one with this method.

When we got back to Kawama, the first thing I had to do was seal the grout on the tile around the tub. One thing I didn't realize about grout was that it needed to be sealed. Now we're low-VOC kind of people. I even know that VOC stands for "volatile organic compound." I sort of understand the idea of a volatile compound. I don't totally understand the organic part. (OK, I just Wikipediaed it; I get it.)

Anyway, so given the news we got while we were away, I made sure to look up the VOC number on the grout sealer. I noticed there was a number. I had no idea whether it was a good or bad number. I figured that it was only once that we'd be using this stuff, and we needed to use it, so I bought it anyway.

It went on like this as long as I was working on stuff around Kawama: Avoid things with VOCs; use them anyway figuring it was better to get it out of the way sooner and sort of lance boils or whatnot.

And then about that the spacious front room on the second floor that we wanted to use for a big office . . . like I said before, it's very easy to fill up space once you find you have it.

Soap Scum As Archaeological Expression

Let's be clear: If it weren't for several key factors, we wouldn't have been able to live out the American Dream at Kawama.

One, the housing market had cooled. It wasn't that there was a deal to be had in Astoria but prices weren't as ridiculous as they could have been. Housing prices had stabilized and flattened out, meaning they were barely in the ballpark for us.

The market being what it was, it meant that we didn't have any competing bidders. We couldn't have gotten into a bidding war. We couldn't have paid the listed price. In a hotter market, we wouldn't be in the mix.

The market being what it was, our skimpy down payment and FHA loan sufficed. The realtor said that the seller was nervous about it, but he convinced him that this was what it took these days.

An interesting note about FHA loans: At the beginning of April, political fighting over the government spending bill was threatening to shut down the federal government. I was reading about it on the way to the closing. It wouldn't have affected our loan, since a commitment was already issued and the bank indicated that they weren't going to stop those, just new loans, but it still got me thinking how lucky we were (again).

As soon as we were done with the major painting projects, I set out to work on the bathtub. Jen's impression of the bathtub made it sound like we'd have to completely renovate the bathroom, but I wanted to try to clean it first. So I went to work doing that.

I don't quite understand what people see in those sliding bathtub doors, but both our apartment and Michael's apartment upstairs had them. You get the feeling that somewhere down the line it was seen as some kind of major technological advance to never have to use shower curtains or something. I don't much like them. They make a small bathroom seem that much smaller. They create a tropical micro-climate that makes it hard to clean. Half the time the damn things fall off the track.

Anyway, so I started by scrubbing the tiles. I don't know if what I was scrubbing off was an extra layer of grout or fifteen years of tenant scum, but I got a lot of it off and it ended up looking halfway decent. Decent enough to forestall a major renovation at least.

Sometimes when you clean stuff you get to a point when cleaning turns into a minor repair project. Kind of like that Viagra ad where the supermarket produce aisle morphs into an orchard, except not as wonderful, and with considerably less certainty.

Which is to say, I started scrubbing at the moldy caulking where the sliding doors met the tub and after seeing that pull away, decided to take down those fucking doors altogether.

Now this could go two ways. It could be a really inspired idea, and turn out great, or all the tile could fall off the wall and shatter and the plumbing would explode or something horrible like that.

Actually, it turns out that it's pretty easy to take off those sliding doors. Our frame was bolted to the tile in three places on either side and held to the tub with caulk. So it came out pretty easily. Inspired! I just had to grout in some holes where the bolts were and put up a curtain rod.

I grouted the holes and spaces in the tile on Friday, just before we left to visit my parents. We got in to Phoenix late that night. The next day Jen took a home test and found out she was pregnant.