Of stinky houses

 Warning:  severe grossness to follow.  (This has been my day.)

Bekah just posted this on my Facebook wall, and I thought it was too apropos to not post here for my non-Facebook readers:



This is pretty much what the house smells like right now - a combination of all the candles in this spoof advertisement. The project of tiling the house is completed except for one tiny glitch. We have a waterless Swedish composting toilet in the one bathroom, as you've heard about before. That wasn't a problem. The bricklayer put the tiles all around it very nicely as you can see:

The trouble is that this handy water-saving ecological toilet requires an escape hatch of sorts at the other end. When we added the second bathroom, we built right over the escape. The bricklayers who did the work left a panel in the cement floor, but as you can see they made it very crooked.

This left a bit of a challenge with the tile work. No problem. We found another bricklayer to come straighten the hole so we can put another metal "door" which we will cover with exactly four tiles, allowing us entrance if ever (heaven forbid) we might need to drain the reservoir.

Last night the bricklayer came, and upon opening the hatch we discovered something terribly amiss. The compartment which should have been empty, leading to the pile of "compost" was instead very full of water. I say water, hoping and praying that it isn't the other liquid which should have drained out automatically.  Poor Jim spent some time with a bucket on a rope trying to empty it by pouring it into the flush toilet.  That was not a fun time.  We lit every candle in the house, sprayed every kind of air freshener, even using Nonnie's magic stink sticks she got from Home Shopping Network that she swears will erase any odor whatsoever.  Finally the smell diminished.  Or maybe we just got immune to its effect.

What exactly happened we don't know. The most likely cause is that the gray water from the showers or washing machine has somehow leaked into that chamber instead of draining properly. What we do know is that all of a sudden we have a major plumbing problem. When I wash clothes, the gray water backs up into the bathtub and bubbles up into the sink. Nasty, right?

Today the bricklayer came and attempted to straighten the hole in the ground, creating an even bigger mess. Dust and stench are everywhere. Since we can't use the bathtub with the nasty wash water in it, the only other option is the shower with all the dust and odor.

This is after serious plunging and chemical treatment

This is what it looks like now

All these years the kids have wondered what it looks like "down there." I think we may all have nightmares now that we know.

I'm not exaggerating, am I?

Now Jim just returned from the gym, and Jonny from baseball practice, and all of us are needing a shower, but what are our options?  I want to run away from home right now.

I should have known this morning when breakfast was interrupted with a 6.5 earthquake shaking the house all the way from Veracruz that this was going to be one of "those" days.

Now do you appreciate Bekah's humor?  She says it's our candles that stink, not the bathrooms full of gray water and worse.  Aren't you glad blogs don't have a scratch and sniff option?