_{The room formerly known as my sleeping porch}

First, some basic facts must be understood. 

1) We live in an old house.

2) When we moved in, it needed some remodeling.

3) Over the years, needy kids always seemed more important.

4) Therefore, we raised all our children — a number that extends well into the double digits — in a house with 1.5 bathrooms. Two toilets, two basins, one tub, no shower.

5) The kids are alright.

There’s another reason that we haven’t tackled extensive remodeling projects: We could see how extensive they’d actually have to be.

In the kitchen, for example, the counters are thigh-high because the original owner was very short and someone else later laid subfloor and saltillo tile, raising the floor considerably. But the sink is one of those old wall-mounted farmhouse sinks, which I love, and the backsplash butts up against the window. If I shrunk the window, raised the sink and replaced the bottom cabinets, they’d overlap the top cabinets and they’d have to be replaced to — and they’re all oak with beveled glass. I don’t want to give them up, so I spend a lot of time bending over. No doubt there’s a solution, but I’ve always been too tired to think about it.

The problem with the upstairs bathroom was simple — it was virtually unusable — but the solution was complex. The bathroom was maybe 4 feet wide, having been sliced out of a bedroom, and the eaves encroached from two sides. The toilet was back in a dark corner, and anyone using it had to sit down. It was a very loud toilet, given that it was bona fide antique, and the kids were scared of it. The corner was dark because the shower stall was between it and the door, leaving only an 18” corridor for short people, because of the eaves. The shower leaked. Rather, when anyone stood in the shower, the floor pushed down but the drain did not, so the water ran around the drain rather than into it, and ended up in the family room below. Every plumber we called said, “Blablabla ought to replace it blablabla but can’t find one that small blablabla custom shower blablabla bazillion dollars.”

We couldn’t turn any of the other rooms into a bathroom because, well, we’d filled them all with children, and the one-bathroom plan was actually working fairly well. The kids learned to take turns, to cooperate, and to value regularity.

Here’s what made it all fall apart: My father died on the last Sunday evening in June. That’s a post for another time, but his death precipitated a huge influx of family, and some of them weren’t exactly down with our choice of children over travertine tile.

When they all left, my husband said, “That’s it. We’re redoing the bathroom.” 

One of our daughters is home for the summer, doing post-doc work on the Navajo Nation, and her partner, home with her, is the son of a plumber. He's a marvel, an expert in all things construction-related. In real life he’s a sculptor, and a very talented, successful one, which means that my bathroom is going to be a work of art, but …

On a Wednesday night, my husband said to him, “Let’s brainstorm a bathroom and you can get started.” In short order, they had convinced me that the only workable plan was to turn the upstairs bathroom into a walk-in (sideways) closet and the room next door into a bathroom. But as children left for college, that room had been turned into my study, which meant that it had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three walls. The fourth wall, under the eaves had a built-in desk with bookshelves above it and, uh, stuff stuffed below it. Did I mention that our house really doesn’t have closets?

On Thursday morning, way early, my husband left for a fishing vacation. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, at least until the body is found.

The family room, now rarely used or even entered, was to be turned into a shared study for both of us, with a long wall of built-in bookshelves. Fine, but the family room was directly below both the bathroom-to-go and the bathroom-to-come, which meant it wasn't available for storage until my new plumbing was sculpted.

The upstairs bathroom has now been demolished. All the stuff in the tiny vanity has been removed to the master bedroom except for one tiny tote that's gone to the downstairs bathroom. All the stuff that had been stored in the shower for 20 years — did you know a lot of stuff fits in a shower? — was removed to the coal room in the basement, which at that point was so full that the plumbing sculptor had to lean all his weight against the door so my daughter could drop the bar to close it.

Then we began boxing up books. There were 142 linear feet of shelves, crammed full, and all those books had to be carried downstairs. Theology is a weighty subject. Under the desk were four boxes of childhood mementos, three pillow forms, all the research files from my last book, a box of antique picture frames, two boxes of fabric and some other, umm, stuff. We stacked boxes into the guest room, until there was no more room. We crammed them onto the sunporch. Then we stacked them into my husband’s office — but not until after surreptitiously taking a whole bunch of his stuff to the church rummage sale to make room. Then I considered stacking more on his side of the bed, but I was afraid it would collapse onto me and smoosh me flat, so we stacked boxes on the front porch, on pallets, under tarps.

Then we gently removed the built-in desk and bookshelves, even though they’re hopelessly the wrong shape for the family room. At that point I turned on my personal plumber and said, “When I have a new bathroom you’re going to be my favorite son-in-law, but right now you’re this close to death.”

He ignored the thumb and forefinger spread half an inch apart and eyed my other hand, the one holding the prybar.

“Err, do you have any other sons-in-law?” he asked. That question is not as nonsensical as it seems, given that our definition of family has always been rather fluid.

“None that are living,” my daughter told him.

That done, we started on the family room. One wall was, um, decorated with a pair of antique wooden skis, a pair of antique snowshoes, two pairs of tiny iceskates used by our children, a pair of tiny soccer cleats, a small skateboard used by my husband way back when, an out-of-bounds sign from a now-defunct (I hope) ski area, a U.S. 666 sign  (the highway was renamed 491 “to cut down on accidents”). Underneath that collage was the stereo and a vast collection of CDs, cassettes, 8-track tapes and vinyl albums. And that was just one wall. The opposite long wall had a row of antique bamboo flyrods and a display case with a full set of antique planes, a level and some other cool carpentry tools owned by my grandfather (who was a banker and only an avocational carpenter). And then there were the bazillion framed family photos.

Plus, there was furniture, a lot of furniture, including two sets of attorney’s bookcases. My family loves books. There was a piano. There were two guitars. There was a gun cabinet, made by my grandfather and more recently turned into a trophy case, and it was crammed with trophies and medals and ... and stuff.

And all of it had to go somewhere else before we could rip out the ceiling. According to my daughter, that wasn't nearly as much fun as taking a sledgehammer to the upstairs wall.

“Why do you have 2x12s above your ceiling?” the instigator-in-law asked. Because they were cheap back in the 1890s when we had a local sawmill. 

“Why do you have eerie strips of gauze hanging from your 2x12s?” he asked.

Because that’s how wallpaper was hung back then: Cheesecloth was tacked up, and wallpaper was pasted to it. Years ago, in a desultory attempt to remodel that room after the leaking shower caused a slight (meaning: not all the way to the basement) ceiling collapse, we discovered that the cheesecloth-hanger hadn’t stopped at the corners. He just went round and round, and as the cheesecloth shrank over the years, the room grew rounder and rounder.

“Why did they use 36 tacks per foot?” he asked.

Dunno. OCD, I guess.

“Why are there rocks in your ceiling?” he asked. That one's a mystery for the ages.

Eventually the way was cleared, and every single room in the house was crammed with stuff from the three rooms we’d had to empty out. We taped pieces of newsprint on the floor and walls of the bathroom-to-be until I was satisfied I liked the arrangement. I picked granite (which actually is cheap where we live), tile, vanity, plumbing fixtures, light fixtures. I signed contracts with the carpenter, the electrician, the surface people.

_{The new vanity, now in transit from some other dimension.}

And then I gave my daughter and remodeler-in-law my debit card and the house keys and informed them I was moving to the teeny-tiny manse in the mountains for the duration.

“Call me when it’s done,” I said.

What if there's a problem?

"For that," I said, "call your father."