**TMI Warning**

I love my home. I have a beautiful library, five fireplaces and rooms with french doors. The house is in a wonderful neighbourhood close to my city’s beautiful river valley and cycling distance to restaurants and cafes and shopping. The comfort is real.

I also love my husband. We share the ups and downs of daily life. I laugh in front of him, I cry in front of him. We have a bond and a lifestyle that keeps outside issues from coming between us. Our joy is is real.

(Aren’t we cute?)

I feel a little bad picking at my bliss, but I have a serious problem.

There are intimate instances during which I do not feel it is necessary to keep the proverbial (or actual) beautiful french doors open between my love and me. For instance, any time that I need to use a toilet.

I have the world’s worst en suite bathroom. It makes me want to wail and tear out my hair. What epic idiot renovated this elegant traditional home with the confused theory that modern marital bliss was compatible with uncloseted toilets? It boggles the mind. One wonders if the architect was some alien being, unfamiliar with the uncommunality of the common commode.

When we first moved in I felt the pressure to be flexible, so in the middle of the night I would stumble quietly into the darkness, groping the walls on my way to the bathroom, and stealthily perch on the uncloseted toilet around the corner. It seemed like a workable situation for a while. Then the inevitable happened.

My husband, who will sleep soundly through the trumpets and clashing swords of the apocalypse, had a bladder full at MY usual hour. We have reached the point in our marriage where our bladders are synchronized, which may sound sweet – the world is full of serendipitists who find all togetherness tales endearing – but it created a situation fraught with peril.

You see, I had already rounded the corner in the darkness and was sitting in cognito on the un-private privy.

When my darling rounded the dark corner I saw his outline against the moonlit window and hissed “I am on the toilet!” He recoiled in alarm, swung his arms – nearly sending all my lotions and pill bottles crashing off my sink counter – and, spinning on his heels, lunged back to bed.

Had he taken his final two steps he most certainly would have emptied his bladder on the spot I, and the toilet, currently occupied. I narrowly averted being peed on.

Consequently, my new midnight routine involves a flight of stairs because I simply cannot risk a repeat of watercloset-gate.

I want a door on my toilet.

I need a door on my toilet.

I need privacy to pee, and one of these early mornings I am going to fall down the stairs and break my neck trying to discreetly make my way down to the main floor bathroom to take care of what I should be able to take care of in my en suite.

God grant me the flexibility to accept the things I cannot change,

the willpower to change the things I can,

and the budget for a private toilet.