If your spouse graciously volunteers to go into your horrible man cav-- oops, I mean "bathroom" to fix your toilet:

1) When your spouse says "please move your things out of my way," it means "find a box and clear all flat surfaces." It does not mean "take the 75 half-empty bottles of hair product and line them up along the edge of the tub." And yes, you need to take all those little bottles of face stuff you have circling the entire perimeter of the sink and put them in the box too.

2) When your spouse is cursing up a storm and has his/her entire upper body wedged between the 9"-wide space between the toilet and the tub, it is not a good idea to stand there silently and watch, slowly and thoroughly rubbing hand cream into your hands the entire time. The person getting sprayed in the face by the mysterious leak somewhere between the wall and the toilet probably has grimy, nicked, and very wet hands at that point and would much rather be standing where you are.

3) When the job is done, come look at it and give hearty congratulations, even if it's not 100% fixed because your spouse needs to get a part from the hardware store and there's a blizzard outside preventing that from happening right now. Saying "That's nice, did you mop up the water?" from the couch while barely looking up from your book may not inspire your spouse to do such work for you next time your bathroom needs it.




OH! and a late-entry bonus!

4) When you DO go to your bathroom, do not emerge to complain that many of your 75 bottles of hair product have fallen into the tub while your spouse was wrestling his/her body into the aforementioned 9" space.

Mrs. Fixit working at your house again today?

One hour was enough! It's a repair I'd put off for a month now, Hubby's toilet was running constantly. Not entirely altruistic of me, the sound was driving me nuts. Now it's not running, but the little pipe leading from the wall to the toilet has to be replaced. I thought it was new enough that I could avoid that, but no such luck.

You want one of the flexible ones.

And if your husband has that many products is he considered a metrosexual?

It's already one of the flexible ones, but it's been there a while, I think it was put in before we moved in. And Hubby is a 52-year-old man who regularly gets mistaken for being under 35. He still gets proofed for cigarettes a couple times a year. It may be genes, it may be face goop, but he's not taking the chance that it's just genes. He's also really lazy about getting the last of something out of a bottle and will open a new one before the other stuff is all gone, but he won't throw the almost-empty bottle away because "it's still got stuff in it." Ergo the hair jel bottle collection.

It could have been worse. You could have had the cats trying to help.

I left out Dino's forays into the bathroom