Still in the powder room, but not for long

At last, we’re going on a trip — our longest to-date. In a few days we’ll head out to California’s Central Valley, where family members are having birthdays and we are going to help celebrate. We’ll also head to the coast to get a snootful of ocean breeze and meet up with a longtime friend who is also Wally’s human breeder. That doesn’t sound right, and I’m working through how to say it better. At any rate she is a Cairn terrier breeder and one of her bitches gave birth to Wally nearly seven years ago. Wow that doesn’t sound much better. Anyway you’ll learn more about her in a few days if you stop by. Here, I mean.

New shower curtain. New nonskid grid thing on the floor. Shower caddie on the wall and NOT on the floor. Progress.

It turns out you just can’t show your new trailer to family if it still has a stock vinyl shower curtain and an unadorned shower floor. So today I installed a kind-of non-skid grid onto the floor, and a quick-dry shower curtain too.

I also “tested” the re-installed Command shower caddie. This time I let the sticky things cure for three days before I got any weight involved. I think it will work better. Note that I still haven’t worked up the courage to put the shampoo/conditioner combo in there. Baby steps.

The shower flooring is made of Duragrid tiles. They promise to help keep our shower clean and safe. I’m not sure how the clean part works. Showers are hard to clean — it’s a fact of life everyone must face after the age of 30.

Just look at the fine workmanship, and the tasteful, understated, bland beige.

The tiles are easy to interlock unless you try to do it wrong, and then it’s quite the challenge. I only got half-way through the project before I figured out the right (and easy) way to connect them. Perhaps there were some instructions I failed to read.

The tiles come in 12-inch squares and, unless you order the optional 8-square-foot shower floor from Escape Trailer Industries ($850) (not really), you have to do some trimming. I ended up trimming a couple of inches off one side and adding to another side. The trimming involved a utility knife, some kitchen shears (don’t tell Sooz), and some difficulty with the dogs’ water bowl, which is always in your way no matter where you are or what you’re doing in our kitchen.

There are now thousands of tiny Duragrid bits on the kitchen floor, and I think we’ll be discovering them for months. Yes, I used the mini Shark vac to clean up my mess. But I’m certain there are more bits down there on the floor.

One thing about grids of any kind underfoot: Tyler won’t walk on them. If he sees anything like that in the street or on a dock, he walks around. Doesn’t. Like. Grids. We’re pretty sure he wasn’t going to spend much time in the powder room anyway.