Every household needs a procrastinator, a person who likes to take time to make critical decisions. And
every home needs a doer, a person who sees something that needs to be done and tackles that task head
on.
Pop quiz: Now you guys out there in newspaper land have been reading me long enough. Who do you think is
the procrastinator and who is the doer in my household? I’ll let that marinate for a minute…
Ding. Ding. Ding. You are correct. I am the procrastinator and the wife is the doer. She spots the
problems and I tell her why it can’t be done.
To illustrate, roughly 10 years ago she informed me that there was a crack in her fiberglass bathroom
tub. Roughly 10 years ago I told her we’d fix it when it starts leaking. This little song and dance came
up every six months ever since and my answer was always the same … when it starts leaking.
Then this past February she came out of the bathroom with a Black and Decker variable speed drill with an
inch and a half drill bit and said, “The tub is leaking now. Can we remodel our bathrooms?”
And so, I finally agreed it was time to update all three of our 45-year-old bathrooms. Now for those of
you who have remodeled parts of your home, you know how disruptive it is to live in a construction zone
— almost impossible really.
So the wife and I hired a great contractor to remodel all three bathrooms while we were on a city tour of
St. Augustine, Florida, in mid-March. Materials ordered, schedules checked, it was all going to be a
seamless project while the wife and I enjoyed the sunny skies of Florida.
Bags packed, we said goodbye to our old bathrooms and headed south in the car. As we reached the Georgia
state line, my phone rang. It was our tour company calling to say that due to the current pandemic
sweeping the country, all tours had been canceled.
“What are we going to do?” I panicked.
“Well, we’ll just have to go home,” the wife said.
“We can’t go home. We don’t have a pot to pee in. The contractors have ripped out everything by now.
There are no tubs. There are no toilets. There are no sinks. And here we are in the middle of a pandemic
when we’re supposed to wash everything for at least 20 seconds and we don’t even have a little squirt of
water at home. We’re going to die.”
Getting on her phone the wife calmly called the daughter who happens to live in Georgia, “Hi honey, it’s
mom. Our trip was canceled, our toilets are missing, the contractors are ripping, and your father is
hissy-fitting. Can we come and stay with you for a week?”
“You know what, mom? You guys keep getting weirder and weirder. Sure, you can come and stay with us.”
We had a wonderful week at our daughter’s with a side trip to see our dear South Carolina friends before
their state locked down. But we started hearing more news coming out of Ohio that the state was ordering
a shelter-in-place and state-wide shut down, so we headed home early.
I called the contractor to warn him of our early return and to check on the progress of the bathroom
update. “Well,” he said, “I can give you one toilet and one shower, but they won’t be in the same
bathroom.”
“We’ll take it!” I said. Then to the wife, “We’re going home. We’re going home.”
“I’m so glad,” the wife said. “Things are getting scary and I just want to be home.”
“You know,” I reminded, “none of this would have happened if you hadn’t found my Black and Decker drill…”
A week later the project was finished and we now have three beautifully updated bathrooms and three pots
to pee in. Life is good.
Raul Ascunce is a freelance columnist for the Sentinel-Tribune. He may be contacted at
[email protected].
