Question 5

Question 5: What do you have to put up with in your life? How long have you been tolerating it?

There are a lot of ways I could answer this. I could talk about how much I hate my job, how much I hate being the primary wage-earner, how much I hate that Jeff was losing weight when we first met but has since stopped and that bugs me.

Instead, I'll talk about not having a washer and dryer in our house. As I guarantee you've heard me bitch about, our house was a disaster when we moved in...and while the primary living areas are much improved, to the point where I feel happy entertaining guests... the other things, like, I don't know, bathrooms, still need considerable improvement.

The house has two bathrooms. The first, and the one we use, is tiny; there's room for a potty, sink, shower and cat box. The walls are gross, one of the walls is actually a taped-shut-and-painted-over door, and the walls above the shower used to be spotted with mold because previous owners didn't replace the exhaust fan when it broke.

The second bathroom, though, is where our washer and dryer - already purchased, and waiting in storage until we can get it moved in - will go. Currently, there's no light in the room, so it cannot be used after dark. It's painted a color slightly darker than the pink of Pepto-Bismol. It's got an unfinished skylight. It's got a weird door that goes directly outside (which I've convinced myself would be good when we have a bunch of little boys running around, as they can come in to go to the bathroom without tracking mud through the house). It's also got the water heater in it.

My plan is that we replace the traditional water heater with an awesome tankless unit that would be on the outside of the house. The sink would be replaced and would slide over to where the water heater currently is, the shower would be replaced with an actual shower/tub unit, the toilet replaced with one that isn't the same 1970s olive green as the sink, and the floor would be tiled. Then we could move in the washer and dryer, and there'd be no more trips to the laundromat to pay $1.75/load to wash and 25 cents for seven minutes of dryer time.

I had Jeff call our plumber yesterday to get a quote. He must not be hurting for work, because, as he put it, he charges whatever the cost of the water heater is, plus $110 per hour to install it. He provided no indication of how many hours it would take, nor even a rough cost of the unit itself. Awesome.

So this is what I put up with.