We are spending a week with Vedran and Janine.  I am keeping busy with various projects around the house. This last weekend Ved and I took out a toilet in the basement.

The house is 76 years old and while lovely upstairs has a mostly unfinished basement. In the basement was the ugliest toilet you ever saw in a rough cast concrete closet beside the laundry equipment.

Roughly 5  foot by 3 foot with rough walls, a wooden door and no sink. No one ever used it so we decided to take it out, cover the hole in the floor with concrete and turn it into a closet for their bikes.

Last night we went to a movie and saw a trailer for the upcoming movie “The Help” Basically the story of black servants in southern homes in the 1940s. A key point was that the help were not allowed to use the toilets upstairs so the houses were built with crude toilets in the basement for the help.

It finally dawned on me that that was what this ugly toilet was in the basement. The original owners had black servants.

So our removal of the toilet was a strike against racism plus adding a storage closet.