We rarely think about such mundane fixtures in our homes such as toilets, but on occasion they remind us just how important they are — or how nasty they can be.   It was such a situation that we found ourselves in this past weekend when our upstairs butt-throne decided to leak and cause it to piss down rain into our kitchen, soaking a cupboard full of dishes, a rack of spices, and leaving many copious puddles on the countertops.    Luckily (if you can call it that), the water was from the tank, not the bowl, so at least it wasn’t a shower of sewage.

Nonetheless, it was incredibly unpleasant to clean up.   Many brave towels gave their lives in the war.   The upstairs toilet had been acting up for a long time, having a disturbing trend of sinking slowly into the floor and resembling the leaning tower of Pisa minus the gawking tourists.   We knew the time was coming quickly when we would have to do something about it (or deal with shooting columns of liquipoop), but this sealed the deal — we had to do something.  The house had a royal flush and we were holding a pair of nines.   Time to be handy.

So, at 5:30pm on Friday night I dug into the task of removing the offending appliance and seeing what I was up against.   Removing the toilet presented a huge amount of rotted floor below it, which explained the problem of the leaning latrine, but didn’t exactly help my confidence in solving the problem.

To my rescue came my father, Wayne, who graciously dropped whatever he was going to do that evening and came over with his tools to help me figure out the best way to redo the flooring since it had rotten out all around the base of the toilet.   After a few hours of fiddling and fitting, we had a new floor in place.     At 8:30pm we took off for Mason City and Menards and, after looking at all the options and pricing privies that were out-of-stock (grrr…), we settled on an Eljer Titan elongated. It has a 10+ rating on flushability (one-flush solves all), 1.6 gallons per flush (eco-friendly), a 16 1/8″ seat height (ADA-approved), and a 3″ flush valve so things move quickly. It was pricey, but our best option for long-term relaxing and enjoyment.

Another couple of hours and I had it installed and working by 12:45am.     It’s a huge, beautiful thing compared to the old piece of junk.   The flushing sequence is quick and fast — you press the lever and there’s a Whooosh–GLUGUGUG! and that’s it.   Done.   Everything you can think to deposit in that bowl gets whisked away to the great sewer in the sky in about a second.   It is very impressive, and I don’t get a kick out of a bog very often.

Below you can see the pictures of our adventure.     And yes, I really did throw the old toilet out of the 2nd-story window.   It was damned fun and highly recommended entertainment.

We have long known that the steps on the east side of our house have needed replacement. This is mostly due to the fact that they were crumbling, sometimes right underneath our feet, and getting worse as each year went by.




Couple this with a bad appearance, an old-fashioned railing, a patchwork patio and sidewalk, and a weather-beated privacy fence and it was certainly one of the less-appealing aspects of our otherwise cute abode.




Moreover, it had become a safety hazard, especially carrying a small child up and down the steps in the dead of winter, snow and ice covering it in slippery bumps. So, it was decided that they must come out and be replaced,
and a deck might be just the ticker for replacing them in a fashionable and useful manner.




Now, whoever originally poured the concrete for these steps should really be congratulated, as it was about the hardest element known to man. Instead of cracking and splintering like normal cement does when you whack it
with a 20 lb sledgehammer, the tool simply bounced off with barely a thump. I sweated and swore and smacked and swung for several days but to no avail. Concrete blades in the circular saw, cold chisels and a hammer, and singing high opera notes did no good. In the end, I had to rent an electric jackhammer from Ace Hardware in Charles City ($65 for a day). My father and my friend Paul helped out the first night getting started on the behemoth.




Here Dad hammers away while Paul works on helping clear the debris broken loose. Despite the fierceness of the hammer, the going was slow and methodical.




Running a jackhammer was a lot easier than I thought. There’s a sweet spot to it where you want to be pushing down hard enough, but not too hard. Not enough pressure and it bounces all over; too much and it can’t pound the concrete correctly. Other than that, it doesn’t necessarily take someone built like a brick shithouse to run, although after doing it for hours on end, you gain an acute understanding of why most jackhammer operators are burly folk.




This was our progress after the first night of work for about 2.5 hours or so. The original plan was to only knock down the top step and leave the rest underneath; however, once we got the top step out of the way, we found that the wall of the house was rotted out and we’d have to at least get that exposed, which is what we did.




A hefty pile of debris after the first night. This also includes the flat concrete pad that was around the steps, which I broke out with a sledge earlier in the week.




The lovely wall we were greeted with once we broke out the steps. It’s clear through into the crawlspace, which probably explains why there was practically a breeze coming from the crawlspace this past winter.




Half done! Dad and I got the wall repaired, posts set, and joists hung all in a night, then he showed up the next morning and kept going. I overslept and woke up to find it already half done. He’s the industrial sort!




Another view of the half-done.




The privacy fence side of it all done.




All done! Up the stairs.




Side of the stairs.




East side of the deck.




North side of the deck.




Modeling the new deck with my son.




Down the stairs! Since this picture I have replaced the brick at the end with a board walkway. Tres pretty.




The decking on the north side.




East side decking.




And the final pile of debris, which hasn’t left yet but hopefully will soon!

It has always seemed that gardeners around me had a timing for getting going in the spring that rivaled even the reliability of the flittering redbreast himself, timing their plantings and tillings to acutely match the torrid thrashings of the new warmth and dashing rains. I always marveled how they could slip things in between drenchings with apparent ease and therefore would have crops weeks ahead of mine, simply because by the time I got my garden planted, it was the end of May and summer was in full swing.

Until now, that is. Maybe the perils of age come with a few pearls of glory.

My father came over with his overpowered tiller on Sunday afternoon and proceeded to beat the tar out of the soil that had lain dormant over the long winter, cussing slightly because I had thought it best to drown it in a few inches of compost, leaves, and grass clippings for good measure. But the old bear of a tiller was the victor in the long run, slapping it into submission, and by evening I had a good plot going.

Normally I would let it sit there for a few days, but I thought I should get a jump on it and tossed handfuls of seeds into hoed trenches, all the while attempting to space them correctly but not so accurately that I would be chagrined for being a pompous anal git.

In this pursuit I discovered a wonderful invention — seed tape. For the uninitiated (as I was, prior to this season), seed tape is where they take something very similar to toilet paper and lay the small seeds of some unfortunate plant (a lettuce mix in this case) between the layers, pre-spaced and pre-mixed for your pleasure. And pleasure I did as it took a ton of frustration out of the process and instead replaced it with maniacal glee at the prospect of planting an entire row of lettuce in 30 seconds or less.

In total, I laid down 4 rows of peas, 3 of yellow onions, 2 of lettuce salad mix, 2 of parsnip, 1 of peanuts, and 3 of green beans. For markers I tried something new, hacking foot-and-a-half lengths of 1/2″ PVC pipe with a saw and hammering them into the ground at the head of each row. That took up about half of the length of the garden.

For the rest, I was planning on planting our usual OMG array of tomato plants. We found out the first year that the red fruit grows extremely well in our soil and, since we love doing things with them, they are our typical “bumper crop” item. However, we buy plants, not seeds, and I had yet to obtain them.

Tuesday evening after work, I decided to find a greenhouse I had seen advertised in Charles City where I work. Since the alternative was either Wal*Mart or a local greenhouse about 15 minutes from home, I thought it couldn’t hurt to check it out.

I tell ya, I’ve found my new favorite greenhouse.

The place is immaculate with this huge array of absolutely gorgeous flowers that makes me want to terraform my entire backyard and house into perpetual flowerbeds. I wandered up and down the aisle just taking in the flood of colors and scents, pure candy to the eyes.

The vegetable section was small, but the quality was not diminished and I was able to pick up 32 tomato plants of 3 different varieties, pay my $17.50 for them, and head on home. Upon arriving home, I checked the darkening sky and radar and decided that I could make a run for it. Over the next half hour I ran, sweated, dug, shoved, planted, and covered all of the plants and still had 5 minutes to stand and watch the sky before the floodgates opened and dumped one of the most gorgeous rains ontop of us.

I love rains like those…start in the evening, done by morning, and a steady yet full downpour that really soaks and settles the ground, cleans the air, and generally makes everything go from simply greenish to GREEN.

And, for the first time, my garden was completely in the ground, leaves and dreams turned towards the skies, taking in that first deep soaking. I smiled to myself as I exited the house this morning, glancing towards my well-saturated garden, and internally patted myself on the back for figuring out the game like the gardeners that I admired. I might not have it all figured out, and the weeds are just as likely to grow this year as any, but I’ve won the first round. Bring on the summer!

Dear Lilac Bush in the back yard by the burn barrel,

I, and no doubt many others in this area of the country, appreciate your overwhelming optimism and unbridled enthusiasm at the prospect of upcoming warm weather and copious amounts of sunshine.

I do, however, question the depth of your judgement at already having put forth the effort to crack out giant buds on the ends of your branches. A bit early in the season, perhaps? Maybe you’ve overlooked the fact that, not a dozen feet away, the lawn is currently buried in five fucking feet of snow such that when I tread upon it, I am now standing level with the top of the picnic table.

This does not bode well for your success.

I only say this out of love and concern for your well-being. I am as encouraged by the brief teasings of weather as you are, but you don’t see me sticking my willy out in it just yet, do you?

I highly recommend instead a Disney vacation and a return to local climes somewhere around mid-April.

Cordially yours,

Nathan

I don’t clear my driveway and my sidewalks because, deep down, I’m a prick.

No, I harbor no ill will towards my neighbors or passer-bys, but when I exit the house, my right nad looks at the other and says, “So, Left, headin’ north for the winter?” “Damned straight,” says Left, and then both proceed to snuggle up tightly against my kidneys and pull out War and Peace. This sort of do-see-do by my giggleberries makes me think that, instead of laboring for hours outside, I’m better off just gunning the car and hoping it makes it out of the driveway yet again, compacting another layer of freshly fallen frozen headache onto the one below it. And no, it’s not even really cold out yet, but the sensation of blotchy-red skin and tingling extremities has its downsides, too. I’m just trying to be practical.

When it comes to snow clearning, I’m apparently in denial.

Actually, I am supposed to call a local snow removal service to come take care of it for me. Their rates are very reasonable (something like $15 for heavy snow, $8 for light) so it’s very worth it to me (and my bits) to take advantage of it. Personally, I have better things to do in my day than to deal with snow removal. I wonder at their reaction when they come by the first time and note that some dickhead has been creating a layered fossil record of the snows of winters past and they have to chip through a half-foot of industrial ice to get down to the ground. Somehow I suspect that the work I’ve done so far will be around till spring.

I went out earlier today to give it the old college try at making a dent on the piles, but all I really managed to do was get a somewhat decent workout. There I was, swinging a garden hoe like I was John Henry and the weather was fine for building railroad, and the all the ice did was glance up from its crossword and give me a nasty frown. I at least cleared the steps and scraped the top off of the mound of snow so generously piled at the foot of my driveway by the snowplows; otherwise, I wasn’t making hardly any progress so tossed in the towel, figuring that I wasn’t going to make much of an impact and by now my boys had had a long enough tropical vacation.

Now…where did I put those tire chains?