From the North 40: Plumbing avoidance issues

When you suffer from what I like to call random obsessive compulsive disorder, as I do, there’s no telling what idea, concept, image, worry, question or song your brain is going to take hold of and run with — whether it’s actually important or not.

Plumbing, the conduit which allows for the safe passage of both potable and waste waters, that’s important, right? I mean, if you are old enough to be reading this, you are old enough to be living as a potty-trained human individual, and you appreciate the importance of indoor plumbing to the quality of your lifestyle.

The plumbing needs of one’s potential home is an appropriate topic about which one should be obsessed, especially when one is considering investing in a remodeling project that has some, let’s just call them quirky, yes, quirky plumbing issues.

I don’t know much about the finer details of plumbing beyond repair and replacement of portions of the plumbing system. I don’t know how to design the stuff so all the water, and the stuff, flow to or fro adequately. I certainly don’t know how to fix or work around some pretty tricky design flaws in a pre-existing situation.

But that — that would be a topic to get obsessive about. Yeah. No. I just can’t get past the fact that the stupid plumbing problem is going to make me have to move one of my walls 1-1/2 feet, which will make me have to move the next wall 1-1/2 feet, and that means my living room is going to be too small to have this cozy little nook sitting area I’ve had my heart set on ever since I thought the room was going to be overly long.

Now it’s just awkwardly long.

I’ve arranged the little drawings of my furniture all over the place in that room, and the only way it looks OK is if we have an outhouse and a little hand-pump well for fetchin’ water, so I can have my nook back to be cozy in.

My husband seems to think that we can just buy new furniture, but he doesn’t seem to understand that it might not work anyway and real furniture is harder to move around than line drawing of the old stuff to determine fit. Plus, my little line-drawn furniture is much cheaper than furniture and, therefore, more likely to be a part of our life than new stuff.

And by new furniture I mean new-to-us furniture — I think China and select third-world countries are riddled with companies that make nothing but gently-used, secondhand furniture, with a line of sofas and recliners sold exclusively at rummage sales and secondhand stores. But that's beside the point.

We won’t be able to afford any of them, new or used, by the end of a construction project. Existing furniture will have to fit in the new space. Nook or not.

And all this time that I've been not thinking about the plumbing, I have been listening, over and over via Youtube, to Neil Young singing “Heart of Gold,” which is on repeat because I can’t get the song out of my head.

No, it has nothing, even through a catchy line or charming back story, to do with plumbing either. I just figured if I was going to keep humming the same two lines of misremembered lyrics, I might as well hear all the right lines straight from the source — who presumably got them right.

The counter tracking the number of times the video has been watched is, at the time I am writing this, at 40,326,027. I figure I’m good for about 26,000 of those views.

This is roughly equivalent to half the number of times, I’ve avoided thinking about that cursed plumbing problem.

(Quick, call an architect. Someone has to be able to make sense of this mess at [email protected].)