When I was married the second time—I know that makes it sound like I am a serial husband, but I have only been married twice (I know I could say “in my last marriage,” but that has no better traction with purists)—my wife and I decided that we needed a bigger house to live in. We cast about for one over a period of months, and finally settled on one that was, to me, an opulent estate in an opulent neighborhood. Well, it had been opulent once, both of them, about 30 years prior. By the time we acceded to the place, it had undergone less pretentious descriptions. Not to say seedy, exactly, more like settled, which is a step above run-down and the finest we could afford. It suited our purposes.

We had a mother (hers) who was to live with us, bless her heart. My wife had two children from a previous marriage, and I had two daughters (I still have them—they are not gotten rid of as easily as a wife is, not by a long shot). We also had a dog, Mindy, who was quiet and well-behaved and absolutely useless in a pinch. We had four bedrooms, and two baths, and that made me feel like King Solomon himself. The problem was—and it is the reason for this post—that both bathrooms were upstairs, and my wife and I slept downstairs.

It was one of those so-called split-level arrangements. If you went in the front door or through the ample two-car garage, you were downstairs. If you went through the back door, you were upstairs. The living room and kitchen were upstairs, the den and laundry room were downstairs. My wife and I gave the master bedroom to her mother, and the children du jour had the upstairs bedrooms. These three bedrooms were easily accessible by the two bathrooms nearby. The bedroom my wife and I occupied was a small room adjacent to the laundry room. That worked out ok—we did get kind of loud sometimes—until about two years in, when I grew weary with late-night attempts to go to the bathroom freshly woken from sleep. Negotiating a hallway and a set of stairs and another hallway in the dark is dangerous; and it will flat wake you up.

Being the gentleman and romantic sort that I am, I told my wife that I would convert the little washroom next to the garage into a full-fledged bathroom. I was confident in my abilities then, and figured that if I ordered a shower arrangement and stuck that in there, we’d both be much better served and less prone to dying young. So I ordered the thing—the package and materials said that it could be completely installed to our satisfaction in a couple of hours—and set to work.

     It took me about a month and forced me to the hardware store about 600 times. I became so familiar with the hardware people that I knew their first names, their spouses first names, where their kids went to school, what kind of pets they had. What I never could remember was the name of the part I needed. I’d walk in, look about like I knew what I was looking for (suave), would find something that looked sorta like what I wanted, but not exactly, and by that time Billy Bob or Lisa Ann would have sauntered over, smirking, and ask me casually what exactly it was that I was looking for. I’d say something intelligent like, “Well, it’s a dooflotchey, and it has this doowhackey thingy hanging out over here on this side, and it’s round but not exactly…” and trail off miserably. While I was describing the thing (my inner draftsman’s eye was inerrant), Billy Bob or Lisa Ann would somehow magically produce the very thing I needed. Then they’d say, with a knowing look, raising their eyebrows up and down a few times, “See you soon.” This happened twenty or thirty times every day.

Hardware store

It has been my fond experience that any sort of do-it-yourself, put-it-together-if-you-can project always has one part that there is only one of. This is insane. Suppose you lose it? Do you have to order a whole ‘nother shower kit? You can order the blasted part sometimes, but if it is a special screw at $1.59 plus tax plus $1,000 shipping and handling and you have to get it from Snail Worldwide and wait about a year for it to arrive just as you’re not home and the FedEx guy won’t leave it, so you have to learn that the FedEx place is inaccessible in some industrial park somewhere, this can be a weighty decision to make. How important could one part be?

     My shower kit had one of those. Little ol’ thing. Looked like sort of a screw-hickey thing. But you can’t fool Savvy Stephen. I put it in the sink so I could remember where it was and it wouldn’t roll away, and Mindy wouldn’t try to play fetch with it, and my stepsons wouldn’t try to hold their doors open with it, and my wife wouldn’t throw it out thinking it was an aberration in her otherwise orderly house.

     After a couple of weeks or so, I had the shower enclosure fairly well put together. The directions said that it should be placed flush with the wall. I learned, to my surprise, that nothing on this earth would go flush with the walls of my house. One would suppose that the walls were plumb—straight up and down. The only thing plumb about them is that they were plumb crooked. Now I had a dilemma. Should I attach the thing to the wall as specified, knowing that I would have to lean to take a shower, or should I stand it up straight and figure out a way to attach it to the wall? The directions were clear on this, at least. In just such a situation as I had, one should use shims to fill the gaps and make everything more stable. So I contemplated the gaps and estimated the shims—one wants to be professional, after all—and concluded that the only shims that would work, in just such a situation as I had, were tree stumps.

     So I went back down to the hardware store, and told Billy Bob that I thought I needed some putty. He instantly fetched some DAP silicone putty, one of those tubes you put into a putty gun. I told him that I thought it would take more, about 50 gallons. He seemed surprised by this, and stifling a sarcastic guffaw, he went to the hard part of the hardware store and got out the heavy-duty stuff and wheeled it back to me on a cart. I thanked him and asked him to give my best to the wife and kids and Buster the goldfish.

A week or so later, I was ready to try it out. Not in a wet sort of way, but in a dry way with my clothes on. Just to see if everything worked. I got in the shower and closed the sliding doors, and imagined that I was under the hot spray receiving accolades for my artistry. Man, that dude sure knows what he’s doing. Why is he a teacher? Ought to been a plumber. Yep. He’s a natural-born tradesman if I ever saw one.

But my finely-tuned sense of these things told me that the shower had wobbles. It was sitting on a concrete platform, and the platform had a step up into the shower. I quickly determined that the step was the culprit, and that all I had to do was to get my sledge hammer out and break up that little offender. A couple of whacks and the step would be a non-issue. But the shower doors wouldn’t slide open. Here I was, imagining myself wet and cold and naked, and unable to exit the shower. I wiggled the doors, tried to slide them open. This went on for hours. I tried everything I could think of. Finally, as I leaned in defeat against the shower wall, the doors slid open on their own. This surprised me, but I jumped out before things changed again.

Now to the concrete step. I wanted my stepsons to see it, the brute strength I offered, the slick way I had with tools. They gathered round, smirking. I licked my thumb and set to with a Finn McCool swing—and nearly knocked myself out. The sledge hammer bounced off the concrete, not a chip in evidence. I muttered ‘mulligan’ under my breath, and swung to again. The result was as before, but this time there were chips. Sledge hammer chips. I graciously allowed as how the step wasn’t that big an issue, anyway.

Mustering up a certain savoy-faire, I went in search of that one part I hadn’t used yet. I looked where I had left it those eons ago, but it wasn’t there. I asked the boys if they had seen it, but they said that they hadn’t. Mindy the dog was non-commital. My wife just rolled her eyes and asked if I was finished yet.

By and by we got it finished and working. The doors never did slide right, and I have no earthly dreaming idea where that part went. I got a Christmas card from the hardware store asking me to stop in again real soon for my next project.