Moving through the bowels of the house...

I am going to plunge right in and point out that this post contains absolutely no bathroom humor, or puns, because jokes like that are a drain on my system.  So continue to shower on the praise, folks, because I am surely going round the U-bend...

I wish I could say that that got it out of my system... but I think I may have gone septic.

Oh, I'm flushed with shame.

Ack!  I must go on before this post becomes clogged with OH MY GOD I CAN'T STOP I'M OVERFLOWING WITH TOILET PUNS!!!

I can't even say "moving on" without sniggering.  So mature! But the reality is that we are about to embark on a tour of part of the house you normally don't see on home tours of the rich and famous (thank god no one rich or famous lives HERE) but where, undoubtably, the majority of us spend some quality time.  If it makes you feel better, maybe you should bring a newspaper to read.

Moving through the vestibule, around the stairs, hidden away, pretending to not even be there, is one of the happiest surprises of this house.

A second bathroom.

There were six of us sharing a bathroom in Århus, which is possible but maybe not advisable unless you have an industrial exhaust fan, great water pressure and an amazing water heater.  And patient people who abide by a schedule.  I had forgotten how wonderful it was to be able to go to the bathroom when you wanted and to have complete privacy for the duration because THERE IS ANOTHER FREAKING BATHROOM UPSTAIRS!!!

The door on the left leads to the kitchen.  We are going behind door number two.

*snigger*

It's not the world's largest bathroom, but it is larger than a lot of the bathrooms I've used in Copenhagen (I'm pretty sure the term "water closet" was coined for your bathrooms, my dears).

Sink to the right, toilet straight ahead (a head *snort*), the dark patch in the back is the shower, but we've not put in a shower curtain yet.  I see the benefits of two toilets in the house, but as yet we don't really have any shower issues to work around.  Anyway, the floor of the shower is heated.  That took us a while to work out.  You turn on the floor heat and then wonder why, god, why do your feet continue to freeze while you sit on the throne?  Meanwhile the dehumidifier is getting nice and toasty wheels.

A word about the dehumidifier.  My husband is a feared of the damp.  This is a perfectly rational fear because his father's house was recently declared uninhabitable due to mold and Denmark is nothing if not damp.  Years ago we lived in Ebeltoft, in a very small, newly renovated apartment that lacked air circulation.  Who the hell renovates a bathroom and forgets to put in a fan?  You can't really throw the windows open when the rain is falling (falling? it drops on you like a ninja in the dark!) at a 45 degree angle and just above freezing.  So we bought the dehumidifier to dry our clothes and to prevent mold from spreading.  It's once again at work, although I am not convinced that having it whirl away in a back room while I can push paperclips through the spaces in the window frames and stick post cards through the gap between the front doors means that our house is now safe from damp... but marriage is all about picking your battles and the dehumidifier's gentle hum when the humidity in the bathroom reaches 50% makes my husband very happy.

Same picture, with flash.  Ugh, it's very clinical, isn't it?

Anyway,you can see a bit more of the shower and this mysterious door just on the other side of the toilet.

This small door leads to...

The most difficult room to photograph EVER.

I have no idea what's going on here.  This is a room purposefully? accidently? made by the creation of the bathroom in what was possibly a hallway or pantry.  The water boiler is perched halfway up one wall like some sort of vulture-bat.  What you see in this picture are pipes that run from the water vat, over and around the room like a spaceship film set and then into the kitchen.  The kitchen being a more recent edition to the house.  You can also see a door.  There's a bolt and everything.  But the door to the back of the house, to the old laundry and coal house (yes, we have some really weird stuff going on in some of the back buildings), is in the kitchen.  Where does this door lead?

To the world's smallest courtyard!  The door is really solidly shut here.  If my husband gets his way, the dryer that we will some day purchase will magic itself into the courtyard by way of not one, but two, old and not very well plumbed doors and then fit through this door which will need to be removed by the hinges, to be placed in that little room that kinda freaks me out.

This is because I once removed part of the floor to see if I could find a water valve.  No valve.  Large deep hole.  No one likes to discover they are standing on a plank above a large deep hole.

Anyway, back to my amazingly small courtyard.  It's got a tree, some random pipes and...

Can anyone say AWESOME??

I have a water pump in a courtyard!  In my house!!

Most of the homes in this town have a water pump in the backyard.  There's also two in the main square, one of which works, and tourists love to stand around pumping cold water on themselves.  (Inevitably someone is standing looking up the spout to see if water is coming.)  Mine may work... after a bit of restoration.  The jolly paint job cemented various bits together that should move independently and some bits that should not move at all are now decidedly wobbly.  But Hey! I have a water pump in my backyard!!