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The Perma-John

Let’s play a game… Let’s call it “Spot the difference!”

Port-a-john

If your guess was “the Perma-John….errrr, I mean Porta-John is missing” then you are a winner!

I’m not sure I’ve told the story about this, but when we bought our house it came with a port-a-potty. Our running joke has been that it was what sold us on the house. :) Patrick had started researching its removal a while ago. There were two phone numbers and some other names on the port-a-potty through which he had several leads. One phone number led him to call a confused foreigner. Another name to a port-a-potty manufacturer in Dahlonega, Georgia. One of the more obvious names connected it to a large company called Waste Management who initially told us they didn’t have anything to do with the port-a-potty business. Upon a second phone call a lady reluctantly told Patrick that the port-a-potty business had been sold to Blu-John some 2 or more years ago! The Blu-John company indicated that they would pick it up and would contact us after some research. Needless to say we never heard from them again.

For a while after this an artist friend was ready to pick it up and haul it off. Either he would haul it to Burningman or give it to another artist friend of his. This dragged on for ages until we gave up. Finally Patrick put an ad on Craigslist a few days ago. We must have had a good 15+ people respond. Some of the reasons ranged from using it for camping and use during a business renovation to using it for the mother’s 50th birthday prank! Patrick then had to send out emails warning that the uhmm….”liquid” would need to be disposed of prior to removal. The list dwindled a bit after that, but finally we found a gentleman that was ready to pick it up right then and there – to convert it into a hunting booth.

The gentleman and his son-in-law came with a pick-up truck. In this picture it looks like they’re moving it along with their pinky finger. The reality behind it is that this was about an hour and fifteen minutes into the ordeal. They had brought a pump and canister to dispose of the “liquid”. Only the liquid wasn’t so liquidy towards the bottom and started clogging up the hose! Finally we just got out our dolly and moved the pick-up truck and port-a-potty to the street. It was still too heavy to lift standing up, so the dangerous decision was made to just slide it on its side. Sure enough the “liquid” started pouring down the truck’s bed, so the two of them attached it as quickly as they could to the truck and drove off. Patrick and I filled some buckets of water and tried to wash the “liquid” off the street…now we’re hoping for some more of that rain that we had last night! ;-D

Port-a-john removal

The Perma-John-less view! We can finally mow the grass (or rather weeds) by that area of the fence now, woohoo. I’m sure we’ll get accustomed to our new view very quickly.

Missing Port-a-john

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Bathroom

Our third and final dumpster was collected. We can see the side of our house again!

Driveway without dumpster

We fixed part of the off-centered bathtub built-in by adding more padding. That seemed to work fine to help straighten out the placement of the knobs, shower head and faucet that the plumber had installed off-center. Except now we noticed that the switch for the (centered) plug looked like it was too for on the left. I don’t even know why this plumber still has a job, or why we haven’t been assholes enough to tell him not to bother coming back.

Shower subway tile

The tile guy laid down the floor tiles.

Bathroom floor

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