Miscellaneous Monday - Help, I'm Surrounded!

Meg Holbrook

I want to talk about chores today, specifically ones that you absolutely hate doing.

I bring this up because this weekend I cleaned the tub. This isn't a normal task for me. I do absolutely whatever I can to avoid this task. If the choice were between cleaning the tub or peeling my fingernails back, I would probably choose the latter. 

Even now, just writing about it, I get the spine shivers like someone dragged their nails across a chalkboard. You may think I'm being dramatic here, and I might be... but I can't help it. Something about being in the tub, scrubbing the walls, you're surrounded!

What household activities freak you out? Which activities do you punt to a child or partner, pay someone else to do, or in some cases just leave unfinished?

 

(actual photo of me cleaning my tub)

 

 

 

Scott Theus

Oh, this is an easy one. My house was built in 1911, before PVC, before copper plumbing, before any building codes of significance.

The bathtub drains into a drum trap which periodically needs to be snaked. Every 3-6 months when the tub refuses to drain and taking a shower after someone (who is making you late to begin with) can mean standing calf-deep in their water.

So...I have to squeeze myself into the cubby in the closet behind the tub, open up the trap, and snake it from the trap to the tub and then from the trap to the main. It literally stinks. I keep a round toilet brush head in the trap to strain out all the hair, so that needs changed too.

Never seen the inside of a drum trap? Here's an example.

 

 

This one is relatively clean, and the pipes are drained so you don't see the dirty, smelly water, soap, and hair that I have, but you get the idea.