2 hours ago
14
August is the traditional time for something major to go wrong with my house. So I’m not surprised, as I’m getting dressed one morning, to hear the middle one shouting something about it raining in the hallway.
“What?” I say, standing on the landing with a shirt half pulled over my head. “What do you mean?”
“Look,” he says.
I look down to see that water is indeed falling from the ceiling in a rain-like fashion, leaving a giant puddle on the floorboards near the front door. “That ain’t good,” I say.
I go upstairs to the bathroom where, some minutes earlier, I had been reading in the bath. Beneath the big claw-foot tub is another puddle: evidently my bathwater emptied straight on to the floor, and then straight through the floor.
“Since when is that happening?” my wife says, coming out with a mop.
“Since now, I guess,” I say.
“I’ll call Alfie,” she says.
It continues to drizzle for another 15 minutes, the hall ceiling darkened and bubbling in patches.
“Ironically, we could use the rain,” I say. “Just not inside.”
“Alfie can’t come until Thursday,” she says.
My wife lays a “Do Not Use” sign in the bath. The shower is upstairs, off the middle one’s bedroom, where I run the risk of striding past his Zoom meetings in a towel. It’s not ideal.
When we moved into the house, the big claw-foot tub was in the main bedroom, and I imagined late, louche mornings where I went straight from bed to bath. But in the end we gave that bedroom to the oldest one, and chose the attic room with the en suite shower instead. For years, I almost never had a bath.
Alfie the plumber arrives on Thursday morning and confirms what I suspected: the plastic waste pipe beneath the bath has cracked at its bend, causing any discharged bath water to pour on to the floor.
“I’ll have to order another one,” he says.
“While you’re here,” I say, “the downstairs loo cold tap came off in my hand over the weekend.”
“I’ll have a look,” he says.
When we reclaimed the main bedroom after the oldest one moved out, my wife decided the big bath had to go. We needed cupboards, she said, and there wasn’t enough space. At my insistence we had it moved to the bathroom, where it replaced a much smaller tub. Since then I’ve become accustomed to louche mornings where I lie up to my neck in a giant bath. Sometimes, when I’m feeling extra louche, I bathe again in the afternoon.
We’re away on holiday when Alfie replaces the waste pipe. There is, however, another problem: after showing a picture of the installation to his dad (Mark the builder, who moved the claw-foot tub to the bathroom in the first place) they have both reached the conclusion that the bath is slowly sinking into the floor.
The flooring – vinyl tiles over plywood – has been compressed by the heavy clawed feet. Under the weight of a full bath plus occupant – me, asleep with the lower edge of my paperback just dipping into the water – the bend in the waste pipe has been pressed against the floor, causing it to crack.
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“We might have to prop the bath up on a couple of small bits of wood until the floor can be changed,” Alfie writes.
“Changed?” my wife says.
“A new floor,” I say. “That’s how you know it’s August.”
But Alfie can’t come that week, or the next. At the tail end of the month we are driving back home when he texts, postponing his arrival from Tuesday morning to Tuesday afternoon.
“I can still have a bath though, right?” I say. “I really want a bath.”
“I don’t know,” my wife says.
“I mean, whatever’s wrong with the floor, the new waste pipe is in,” I say. “Isn’t that how we left it?”
“I can’t remember,” she says. “Text him.” I send a text on my wife’s phone, asking for permission to bathe.
Alfie’s reply says: “I’d advise against it at the moment!!” I sigh dramatically.
“A no, then?” my wife says.
“He says his dad has a picture of the old pipe when it was installed,” I say, “and it was well clear of the floor.”
“Oh well,” she says, “it’s just another two days.”
I look out the passenger window as the baked fields roll by. “I’m having a bath as soon as we get home,” I say. “I don’t care.”
