Our house was built in 1929 out of left-overs. Through the years, as we’ve remodeled, we’ve discovered all kinds of oddities that speak of frugality in construction materials, and the creative use thereof. The house is a mixture of positives and negatives. One of the positives was the claw foot tub in the bathroom. It took a while for us to discover that the tub only had three of its claws. Some delusional person had propped a metal coffee can under the tub where one of the feet should have been. It balanced itself on three feet for years.
As romantic as the claw foot tub seems, you can’t easily take a shower in one. We tried to remedy that by installing first, a telephone shower and then a contraption that looks like a metal halo on a stick.. You attach a shower curtain to the ring and stand inside. It was a hopeless failure. The shower curtain would stick to your body as soon as the water began to flow. We replaced that with the same kind of track that held the curtains hospitals use to separate beds. Failure again. Some kind of non metallic magnetism between the water and the shower curtains made showering impossible. So, we gave up and took baths. These were nothing like the baths in the movies or on TV…fear of burning the house down with all of the candles, kept us to bathing with only the ceiling fixture alight.
I begged my spouse to install a shower in the basement. He tried all kinds of logical arguments to dissuade my suggestions, but I wore him down. We put one of those inexpensive prefab units right next to the door that led to the old cistern and hung a medicine cabinet on the wall. I gussied up the place a bit with a nice bath mat, filled the cubbies on the shower wall with emollients and soaps and pondered what plants could survive the bleak darkness of a cellar that had only glass blocks to let in light. We had a real shower.
It was and is chilly in the basement. Very chilly…. Taking a hot shower on a cold winter’s day was fine until you had to leave the shower to dry yourself off. That was a challenge. You had to move fast. Did I tell you that the washer and dryer were only a yard or so away from the shower? It was out of this propinquity that I discovered paradise. I had done a load of laundry that had included towels. The dryer cycle ended at the same time as my shower and retrieving a towel just fresh out of the dryer was like Archimedes discovering the law of displacement. ….although, thank the Lord I didn’t feel the need to run down First Street yelling Eureka.
I was thinking of that the other night as I finished my ablutions in the shower that we installed about ten years ago in a small addition to our original bathroom. It’s lovely but there are no hot towels to be had. Granted, the bathroom is not as chilly as the cellar, but the failings of our abode seem to rise up in the cool of the bathroom, reminding me that you can’t have it all. Maybe that’s the charm of our house, hot towels in the basement and a very nice shower stall on the second floor. Kind of like that coffee can under the tub.
