Fightin' the Funk

The other day I was shooting the breeze with Jeremy and Dave (the carpenters) about their past jobs. Jeremy told the story of a woman who had asked him to replace a toilet because "the workers" had used it...

I laughed.

...and then remembered that Jo-Elle is pretty adamant about changing out the fixture in our first floor powder room which sits on the far side of the great wall of Kitchenistan...

"...funny you should mention that Jeremy...ummm...we probably will change out the toilet...but not because of you..."

And it will not be because "the workers" used the toilet, though everyone who has put in work on the project has certainly made deposits into that fixture too. And, while I have held off on writing about the phenomenon, it has been impossible to ignore. As you can imagine, with more than a dozen (at times sweaty) guys moving in and out, it has been a tad funky.

For a while, funky did not adequately describe it. While there was still a door on the bathroom, it emanated a very masculine musk. It was probably not dissimilar to the smell of a gallon of bull semen slathered on the floor and topped with a quarter inch coating of grime.

Recently, some demolition has been done to the walls of the bathroom, and the air flow has been quite helpful. So, after a fateful meeting in the South Loop Whole Foods, Jo-Elle felt compelled to do something very brave. She donned rubber gloves and scrubbed the whole room down. It was a courageous act fueled by one thing...

...a fear of cooties.

You see, Jeremy is a newly wed. And meeting his wife in the grocery store stoked the fire of a dread that had long been smoldering in that prodigious brain of hers. Jo-Elle was already concerned that cooties were multiplying on the various grime-covered surfaces of that Kitchenistan powder room. She feared that those cooties might make their way into our lives---but the thought of those cooties roaring into the lives of this beautiful new union was too much to bear. The guilt of allowing this menace to be interjected into their home together intolerable. So armed with a mountain of Method and Formula 409, Jo-Elle eradicated the cooties to protect fellow wives everywhere. "I hope someone would do the same for me..." she muttered in preparation for the bacterial blitzkrieg.

For the record, the fixtures currently sparkle and I am filled with enormous pride at Jo-Elle's willingness to take address her fears head on. That said, the one-time presence of the cooties (along with some flushing problems in the plumbing) will be enough to doom the current toilet. A clean low-flow model will take its place in the new space...