Glorious realisation of long term ambition

Not single-handed yet gracious achievement of world peace and/or gender equality. Not annihilation of my enemies. No. What we are talking about here is something that is a little more limited in its impact, but that doesn't mean I'm not grinning like a loon every time I remember that it's finally happened.

Today, brothers and sisters, was a great day. For today we finally got rid of the brown mulch which has passed for a bathroom carpet for the last four and a half years.

Words cannot express how much I hated that carpet. Every time I used the bathroom (maybe three times a week [there's a shower off my bedroom, I'm talking baths here rather than total washing instances] so that's about 500 times) a little piece of my heart wept and I became a little more frustrated, a little bit less chilled, than I needed to be.

Bathrooms can and should be places of retreat, of cleansing, of mulling, of peace. I see a good bathroom as one of the apexes (can that really be the right plural?) of civilisation. Our bath is big and enamelled and our bathroom generally, being of pleasing proportions and equipped with natural light and good quality porcelainware, is geared up to meet its mission in almost every respect. But until today its disgusting floor covering -- cheap, dark brown, smelly -- did a fine job of negating everything positive about the bathroom experience.

I am not quite sure how this all took so long -- on every list of household priorities I've made since we moved in, "get rid of the bathroom carpet before I hang myself with it" (or similar) has been top of my list. If I lived on my own, it would have been gone within days. I'd rather step out of the bath onto coconut matting. Or baked beans. Anything.

But I don't live on my own, and my housemates past and present have simply not cared that much about the Vilest Carpet in the Northern Hemisphere.

Today's carpet removal was in fact a side effect of an entire bathroom restructure -- keeping all the same bits, but moving them round so K our new lodger can stand up in the bath and have a shower. One of my fellow plumbing pupils -- who has been plumbing for four years but is only now getting his qualifications -- is doing us a deal.

K gets a shower. I get a new bathroom floor as a result. It's all good.

joella