All you need is shelves, yeah, shelves is all you need ….

It has been a long month and a half that we’ve been living out of the guest bathroom. The guest bathroom does not provide the comfort that our super master bath with its five shower spigots offers. The master bath bath & shower combo is like hotel living. We’ve moved beyond that. It’s like we were shoved back into our little apartment and living right back on top of each other. There were stairs to climb in the morning (a plus for calorie burning), towels to remember to transfer, soap to carry up and down the stairs, and forgotten items here and there that never seemed to make their way up the stairs to the guest bath for total shower comfort. It was an inconvenience. The water pressure is weak up there in the guest bath and it only comes from one place. What is that? We can’t go back there. We were twenty steps away from a full-on suffer.

Before we were living out of a bathroom suitcase, we were living the high life with five shower spigots, room to jump and play, and a see-through door that provides orientation and shower-exit ease. I can go on and on about the many conveniences and reasons for why we prefer the master bath shower, but it really comes down to one principle: it is our master bath shower and we want to use it.

On May 24th, early in the morning, I stumbled upon bright orange moss and a tiny mushroom growing out of the baseboard trim to the right of the master bath shower. I was confused and stunned. I screamed! Our bathroom was under attack and living spores were marching to battle in our safety bathroom zone. Mr. Husband rushed in to save me from what was surely a monster of mythic proportions. As I stood there stunned, Mr. Husband annihilated the foe by wiping away the devilish fungus with a piece of toilet paper. Maybe he used 3-4 squares. It was quite a battle. And, me, totally in shock at the beast that had invaded our happy bathroom zone—I did not take a photo. Ah, but the image of the fiend is seared upon my mind. I see the orange and mushroomy shroom imprinted on the back of my eyelids.

Scarred I was. The sanctity of our shower zone had been defiled. Something was very wrong with our get-clean sacred space. It was dirty. It was damp. It was growing things. Ew.

Mr. Husband took the reins and vowed to rid our happy home of this intruder. It took him over 18 phone calls and 12 emails and almost a month and a half to see victory and have shower calm restored to our kingdom. The first step that the builder and his team of sometimes qualified and oftentimes unqualified soldiers did to investigate was to remove the baseboards from the master bath crapper. From the toilet bowl zone, we would watch to see water creep-creep-creep over the cement slab that was visible from behind the baseboards. This was the test site. This was the trial and error test site where we would run after taking a shower whenever the builder told us it was fixed. We were told, “the shower is fixed, try it out in the morning to check the slab to see if water still appears.” Four times we did this. 75% of those attempts revealed water. At one point, the water puddles got worse after a failed fix attempt.

They rebuilt our shower four times. FOUR times. Each time, they located a new problem. Each time, we’d shower and run around to the crapper to review the visible slab behind the baseboard to see if our shower would be our shower again. Yesterday, we saw no water. Today, we see no water. Two days in a row. The shower may be ours again!

The builder brought with him a thick layer of dust everywhere. The dust from constructing and reconstructing and reconstructing again and again our dear shower did not contain itself to master bath and bedroom—it covers our
living room floors and our kitchen counters. It crawled all over our home as a mocking reminder of the master bath shower fate. We will probably have to hire someone to clean the mess—I am not skilled enough at cleaning to tackle this job. Everything we touch has that slightly gritty feel of tile shavings and wood and grout.

And the end result? Marvelous. We were patient while the building and rebuilding continued. The shower experiment had to come to an end some day. We were fortunate to have a second bathroom and that we didn’t have to use the kitchen sink. If there were size issues in shoving Mr. Husband’s 6’7” frame in the guest bathroom shower, there are definite size problems in getting him clean from the kitchen sink. Of that, I am certain.

The builder tiled the shower all the way up the ceiling. They had never really dealt with the super shower with five water spigots before. Most people choose the whirlpool tub when given a choice between super shower and super tub. I grew up in a Kohler house with whirlpool bathtubs around every corner—we wanted something different. Sometimes different for us is also different for others. The builder didn’t quite understand how to plan for so much water. This is understandable.

To make it all better—they added two shower shelves for free. Shelves. Turns out, shelves is all we need. We are more than happy with our newly rebuilt super shower with 30% more tile and 100% more shelves. Shelves is all you need, yeah.