First World Problems…

I’ve never been a big fan of baths, preferring a nice, hot shower. Even as a child, I started using the shower before I was old enough to reach the shower switch. In any event, i suppose that as long as one cleans oneself regularly, that’s all that matters. I bring all of this up because I’ve been experiencing and enjoying showers way more than a person rightfully should, lately. And because I’ve been enjoying my showers, I thought I would share that joy with all of you. Isn’t that nice? Cough, cough… Moving on…

My home originally featured two bathrooms. One was upstairs and featured a bathtub and the other was in the basement and simply had a small, box-style standup shower. The upstairs shower worked but would leak into the basement due to a broken seal on one of the water pipes. Since there was no access behind the shower wall, it would cost a heavy amount to remove the drywall, repair the shower and repair the dry wall. So ultimately, my wife and I were limited to showering downstairs.

About a year and half ago, our foundation shifted and opened a crack in the western concrete wall of the basement. Although we could tell from the walls and some features that the house had shifted, we couldn’t see the extent of the damage hidden behind the walls or predict that a rain storm that followed would partially flood the basement with ground water (which our insurance policy ironically doesn’t cover). That’s when Grasshopper Construction came to our rescue.

They were able to demolish the existing basement, repair and shore up the foundation and brace it all around. The majority of homes in Regina require this bracing by virtue of the shifting soil in the area, but our home was never done. Once the bracing was done, the foundation was sound and safe but now we had a bare concrete basement, which couldn’t be used for any liveable purpose. This included the loss of the downstairs bathroom and shower.

Big deal, right? We still have the tub upstairs. That’s exactly what we said, over a year ago. But I have to admit that filling, sitting and using a tub for the purposes of daily cleaning is tedious. There’s nothing quite comparable to the ease and convenience of jumping in the shower for five minutes and being done. So after a year and a half of lowering my bulk into a restrictive space and trying to maneuver myself to wash all my 2,000 parts (if you don’t remember those Lever 2000 commercials, that joke will be lost on you), I had enough of baths.

A little over a month ago, the renovation of our downstairs was finally completed and we’ve had a working shower (and a much larger one, at that) for several weeks. Although this isn’t my usual type of post and there’s no real lesson contained in my words, I was having a hot shower this morning when I realized I was enjoying the “perk” of having a shower. Isn’t that amazing? Something that the average person takes for granted is something I had to have destroyed and go without for a year, in order to appreciate. There may be a lesson in there after all…

But just so that I can say that I shared some knowledge, did you know that a guy named William Feetham is credited with inventing the modern shower in 1767? It wasn’t until that point that daily bathing became a common practice for proper hygiene and better health. There you go, I shared some knowledge. ☯️