Toilet Troubles

I don't clean toilets. I don't know if you have read on my side bar that I spend my days trying to get out of cleaning the toilets in our house. I don't do them. I will do everything else in order to get out of cleaning the toilets. I will wash the showers, scrub the floors, clean the sinks, do the mirrors, wipe the walls. I'll do all the laundry, fold it and put it away. I'll do all the dishes, make dinner and then clean the kitchen. I'll vacuum all the floors bathe the dog and then put the baby down for a nap. I will do all of this and and all Marcelo has to do is clean the toilets.

(Actually I don't put Marcelo's clothes away. I just fold them and put them in a basket for him to put away himself) But I do all these other things and I HAPPILY do it in order to get out of cleaning the toilets. That's how much I hate cleaning them.

Old roommates will remember that every time we would have cleaning days, I would trade with the other person who was doing the other bathroom and I would do their shower AND their sink in order to get out of doing the toilet. I cannot emphasize how much I hate cleaning toilets.

Why? Did I always have this aversion? Yes. It comes from growing up in my house. Let me tell you a story. See when we first moved into our house back in 1993, we put in new vinyl flooring in the bathroom. We actually hired a professional to do this because at the time we didn't know how to do it ourselves. And I don't know if you know how easy they are to install. I have probably PERSONALLY installed about 15 of them. And I can tell you that it is NOT difficult to remove and re-install the toilet. But this bonehead decides to CUT AROUND the toilet.

And of course, we needed a new toilet in about 5 years. Why is that? Well, because of the BFTT's of course. What are the BFTT's you ask? Well, those are the Bingham Family Toilet Troubles. And boy do we have them. We are notorious for clogging toilets, spending great blocks of time in the bathroom on the toilet and more than one of us have had a serious "explosion" issue at one time or another.

But back to my story. I'm sure we got the toilet because we were clogging the previous one so much. But there was a slight problem: The base of this new toilet was a narrow oval. But the previous toilet was a more boxy angular one. And because the vinyl had been CUT around, this mean that there was now plywood exposed at the base of our toilet.

Again, maybe you are all thinking "So what?" Well, there is one more thing you need to know. the 3 men living in the house had no aim whatsoever when it came to peeing in the toilet. Actually, my father was a raging diabetic for probably 6 years and he never knew. He would just keep getting up 4-5 times a night to go pee. (You would think that the fact that he wasn't pregnant but still peeing as much as a pregnant woman does would've made him realize that something is wrong) Anyway, in order to keep from waking up all the way, he would just whip it out and start peeing in the general direction of the toilet. He would listen until he could hear the sound of his pee hit the water and then he would know where to continue to go.

I'm not making this stuff up. Every morning there was a puddle around the toilet. We actually used to have a trash can next to the toilet by my mom moved it after she would routinely find inches of urine in it week after week. And it would mold over. It was really nasty. AAAND it would seep down into the plywood and just sit there. The plywood would soak it up and there was no way you could get it out. You would scrub and scrub and it didn't matter. Actually, once you cleaned the bathroom, the moist wood would release the odor that had been"fresh locked" in and it would be terrible. Who else's bathroom smells worse AFTER you clean it? But ours did.

And of course the boys never had to clean the bathrooms. They never had to clean up after themselves, so they never worried about peeing on the outside of the toilet. Our bathroom always smelled of urine. ALWAYS. 365 days a year. And we only had one bathroom, so there wasn't like any other option to where we could go to pee. Because of this, I became the world's fastest peer. I can be in and out of the bathroom in 40 seconds, and that INCLUDES the washing of the hands. There is nothing worse then sitting down and having the dank old smell of urine waft up to you from the floorboards.

So basically, I don't clean toilets because of the smells associated with them. But I have a wonderful husband. He NEVER MISSES the toilet. Since living with him, we have never had a toilet that smells like stale week-old urine. And even if we did, he would clean it up because, well, did I mention that I don't clean toilets?

And finally,the other toilet trouble we have is that we tend to drop our phones in the toilet. It must be a family habit. My mom has lost 2 in there in the last 6 months. And Jules just lost her phone in there last week when she was home. My mom could fish hers out but not Jules. Hers was REALLY lost. It got jammed in the pipe and they had to buy a new toilet cause it wouldn't come out.

Ha! Now that's a REAL toilet trouble.