By Staff
Michelle Blaylock, Mom’s Corner
Have you ever noticed how every house has its own little quirks and sounds?
The reason this comes to mind is that we visited my parents in Tennessee and ended up flooding their downstairs bathroom because of one of those little quirks!
You see, in their downstairs bathroom, which, by the way, is only used when someone comes to visit, if you flush the toilet too hard it pops the chain off. Well, this time the chain became lodged underneath the stopper and the toilet ran, and ran, and ran and, of course, flooded the bathroom.
I’m not talking got the floor wet. I’m talking flooded — ankle deep flooded — the bathroom! My 17-year-old daughter came pounding up the stairs with, “Come, quick! There’s a problem downstairs!” Did I mention this was at midnight? Of course, my first thought was, “Whose sick?” Her response was, “No, there’s toilet water everywhere!” Uh-oh.
She wasn’t kidding either. I grabbed my mom’s towels that are, um were, a beautiful beige. What I didn’t realize is that mom had used one of the bottles of cleaning stuff that turns the toilet water blue. Hence, mom’s towels now have a beautiful light blue tint. Oops. Anyway, after 20 minutes of soaking up the water, my daughter and I got the bathroom dried out.
I was feeling fairly good. At least it was cleaned up and I hadn’t had to wake up my mom.
Unfortunately that feeling went south when I stepped into the family room and onto carpet that was soaked. It was still drying out when we left on Sunday.
John and I have owned four houses and each one had its own little quirks. For example, in our first house you had to bleed the radiators fairly often or you froze upstairs. In our second house every time the central system kicked on the bedroom doors would either move if they weren’t closed all the way or if they were closed they would jiggle. It was a little unnerving at times.
Our third house was an old Amish house turned English. How, you may ask? The people we had bought it from had installed electricity. Well, sort of anyway. They had installed a whopping 40 amps of electricity. When we first moved in we couldn’t run the microwave and the washing machine at the same time. The microwave would turn, but it would not heat anything up! John soon fixed that by running 250 amps to the house. Of course that house was 150-plus years old, so it had tons of little quirks.
People eventually become accustomed to their house and its little quirks and simply don’t notice them anymore. It’s like people who live next to railroad tracks and don’t notice the trains. I said one time I didn’t see how people could stand to live here or there. My dad, who refers to Tennessee as “God’s country,” replied with, “Well, you know you can get used to anything if you live there long enough. After all, look at you. You got used to living in Alabama, didn’t you?” Oh cute, Daddy, real cute.
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