Welcome, come on in. Let me give you a tour of our new bathroom. We’ve painted the walls a beautiful sage green, installed a double sink vanity, and replaced our perfectly fine, functioning bathroom door with a sliding barn door. It’s exactly like a regular door, except it never closes.
That five-inch chasm between the door and the wall is not a design flaw. Our interior decorator has assured us it’s the next evolution in “open concept.” Now, nothing in this house happens behind closed doors, because we don’t have any. If you need to rip a cartoonish fart that sounds like a GarageBand sound effect, give us a heads-up, and we’ll make sure to turn all the music off and immediately stop talking.
Where are my manners? Can I get you anything to eat? I just made a batch of deviled eggs. Maybe some broccoli cheddar quiche?
We love our new sliding bathroom door because it’s a real conversation starter. And by that, we mean it facilitates a dialogue between the dinner party guests enjoying a home-cooked meal and the dinner party guest expelling that home-cooked meal from behind a glorified saloon door a few feet away. The spontaneity will literally keep you on the edge of your toilet seat.
Can I offer you a cup of coffee? Have as many as you like.
Don’t worry, it’s not like our toddler / the dog / the cat / a gust of wind is going to accidentally swing this bathroom door wide open while you’re in the middle of tweezing a whisker off your chin. There will be nothing accidental about it.
Of course, not being able to close isn’t the only notable feature of our sliding barn door; it’s also incredibly loud. We love hosting parties and watching our non-bathroom guests hear that barn door start rolling down its tracks. “Is that a train coming?” they ask. “No,” we laugh, “it’s just the sound of Dave discreetly trying to take a shit.” That’s the kind of radical transparency we strive for in this house.
Believe me, I know a sliding barn door takes a little getting used to. You’re not the first friend to ask, “Are you sure this isn’t broken?” “Is there another bathroom I can use?” and “Why would you ever make that much bean dip?”
But hear us out: Have you ever gone for a country drive, stopped at a farm to pick up some fresh eggs, and then wandered into the horse stables? You start petting the horse’s silky mane, feeding it handfuls of hay, and asking it how work is going. It’s not until later that you realize that the horse was pooping the entire time.
Honestly, this was a watershed moment for us. To know we were no longer beholden to the constraints of “just talking” or “just pooping.” With a sliding barn door, we could do both at the same time.
This rotting hunk of warped wood we haphazardly hung on the wall? It’s from that same farm. And guess what? When the man who owned the farm heard we were going to use it for our bathroom door, he charged us only two hundred dollars. He said he had more where that came from and we should tell all our friends.
Sorry, did you say something, or was that a primordial squelch that escaped from the bowels of your inflamed bowel? Should I stop saying “bowel”? Just let me know when you want this bathroom semi–to yourself.
Speaking of bowels, we stayed at a hotel in the Bowery last month and were thrilled to see the bathroom in the room had a sliding barn door. We’ve been married for fifteen years; there are few things left for us to experience together. But spending a weekend in a confined space where the bathroom door can’t mute the sounds of your spouse’s explosive response to an undiagnosed lactose allergy? That’s a new core memory I’ll treasure forever.
What’s that? You desperately need to use the bathroom now? Why didn’t you say something? I’ll get out of your way. You know how to use a bidet, right?