Constructive Choices

There's something called face blindness, where people can't recognize or differentiate others' faces. I have something called bathroom faucet blindness. And cabinet handle blindness. And grout-color blindness. This is a big problem since we are re-doing a bathroom. There are many bathroom faucets in the bathroom faucet spectrum that I find pleasing. "I kinda like any of those," however, is not an acceptable answer to the contractor.

The once and future bathroom.

There was a leak. There was rust. There was mold. Men came and turned the bathroom into a bathroom skeleton. (Talk about not wanting to see how the sausage is made! Have you ever seen the inside of your house's walls? I do not recommend it.) There were metal support frames and concrete, and it was a bit smelly for awhile until the giant, loudly-whirring fan did its job to dry everything out.

And then it was time for all the decisions. I spent one torturous afternoon at a plumbing fixture supply store. Shower heads and bathtub handles and toilets and toilet handles and sinks. Colors, shapes, methods of mounting things. Help! Please, help! Ricky has much better taste than I do, but he couldn't go.

Even when Ricky has been around for some of this picking-out process, the salespeople pretty much ignore him. The unspoken industry standard seems to be that the woman is the boss when it comes to the preferred way to mount a bathroom sink. Everyone we talk to makes eye contact only with me. This is the complete opposite of buying a car.

The tile guy left a chart of grout colors ranging from beige to beige. So I picked beige. One of the middle ones. (I use the same method when selecting a stall in a public bathroom -- one of the middle ones. I don't know why I do this, but there it is.) The next day, the tile guy tells me it took some time for them to find the grout I had picked because it was a "special order."

Argh! Why did they waste time looking for it? I would have just randomly picked one of the other beiges in the middle of the chart. Sigh.

Maybe I will understand the importance of all these choices some day. Maybe there will be a time years from now when I look at my toilet handle and say to myself: "Thank heavens I selected this exact toilet handle! What would my life have been like if I'd gone with stainless steel?" But I doubt it.