“The RoseBouquet”

I hardly know what to talk about this morning. There’s the deep snow I’ve just plodded through to get to the office, the weather, basically. Then there’s the complications last week in the reno work. Perhaps that is the bigger story. The weather is more incidental.

Last week Jake came to lay a new bathroom floor. When I moved into this house in 2007, there had been a continual leak under the sink for so long that the sub-floor had got soaked and was rotting. The inspector had insisted that it be replaced with a good plywood floor and then a strong vinyl flooring on top of that. Jake decided that the right thing to do was to remove the toilet first. It was, but things can easily go wrong when you do that. It came away without a problem, and it appeared he got it into place nicely too.

Furthermore, Jake also got the basement window job done, and had to remove both the bathroom door and the basement door to shorten them because they were sticking. Wednesday was a full day for him, but he got it all done by about 3 pm.

After he left I discovered that the toilet was not flushing properly. So I called him at home to report this.

Jake and his wife were out on other errands or social calls that evening, but they made a point of coming by, and he finally figured out that the toilet tank would only fill if he turned the lever underneath just half a turn. Okay, we assumed it was fixed.

About midnight when I was preparing for bed I discovered it was not. The toilet over-flowed! I managed to get rags around it in time. I decided to wait until morning. I decided not to flush until I’d had my bath, so I’d be dressed if there was a crisis. It overflowed even worse than at midnight! (I’d never had such a problem before in my life!)

I waited until 7:30 to call Jake. He was confounded but promised to come see what he could do. When he arrived I had already been bailing and taking the excess to the garden for compost for a while. He checked the large pipe in the basement but found nothing there to plug the system. Finally he decided to remove it and re-install it. That’s when he discovered the large inner rubber ring had shifted when he placed it the day before and in effect blocked the toilet drain. Jake had to go buy another one. He got it all done properly at noon, although I thought the caulking around the base did not look very nice and tidy.

I got busy and cleaned up in the basement and generally, for the inspector was coming at 3:30. All the RRAP projects were done. Well, he wasn’t quite happy with the way Jake had finished the caulking around the toilet and the doorway in the bathroom, and he wants him to re-do some work around the threshold of the back door. He will send an official letter demanding this before I pay Jake his last check.

In the meantime, I’m now preparing in the basement for laying of ceramic floor tiles that I had got from Dad. I worked at preparing things on Saturday until my back cried “Uncle!” This is going to take about three months of Saturdays!

P.S. Incidentally, our Mouse War score is 20 - Snowflake killed his third mouse on Sunday. I’ve re-set my traps. Boy, one can’t relax in this war at all!