The rest of the week following my birthday was pretty chill. The biggest news was that our bathrooms were finally overhauled by maintenance. They spent two days, first gutting our floor and pulling out all the tree roots from the pipes, and then pouring cement over the whole thing the next day. As sad as we were to see the giant pile of dirt behind our toilet go, it was rather exciting to use our bathroom again. And by exciting I mean shockingly amazing at how much easier life was with a completely functioning bathroom.
The long view of our entire bathroom. Love the pile!
The hole! This one hole solved all our bathroom problems!
I'm not sure I've explained fully what our bathroom status was prior to this event. When I arrived, our toilet had no water in it or the tank so we had to use a bucket to flush (it kind of worked okay that way). Our sink and shower both drained poorly. This worsened over time until the shower flooded the room that fateful night (Vday) and the sink basically quit draining at all. My roommate persisted in using our bathroom while I gave up completely and became the bathroom nomad, traveling to the other rooms to use the shower or toilet. Her persistence resulted in every once in a while poop erupting out of our shower drain (GROSS!!! is the correct response). Bottom line: pretty bad. The other bathrooms weren't faring too much better. The other girls' room had a functioning shower, but no functioning toilet and a sickening smell that was so bad that if the bathroom door was left cracked open, they would wake up in the middle of the night. The sala toilet (which all the girls' were using for a couple months) would randomly stop itself up and refuse to work for a while. The boys' bathroom (ironies of ironies) was the only fully functioning bathroom in our house.
Our sink at its worse. It wasn't draining and so a bunch of tiny, black worms (the spots of black in the photo) decided to borrow it for their swimming pool.
The maintenance never responded to our pleas for help. Apparently these problems have been the same for the past seven years because of our giant beautiful tree in our patio. It's roots like water (go figure) and so it takes water from wherever it can find it including our bathroom pipes. The house was getting tired of going in and making such massive repairs which were then nullified within a few months by the tree again. As a group, therefore, we decided the tree had to go. This decision was made a few weeks before the repairs actually started. Thankfully, they decided to repair our bathrooms before chopping down the tree and so March 24th I entered our bathroom for the first time in about 2 months! A date for the history books. Bottom line: I can now use my bathroom to its full potential and life is much more beautiful because of it!
