Danny Katz: Whoever designed my home was a monumental twit

The bank guy was round at our house, sitting at the dining table, telling us about our finances. He gave us good news so we pushed a little plate of Scotch Finger biscuits towards him as a gesture of appreciation.

Then he told us the bad news so we slid the little plate of biscuits away because we couldn’t afford to give him one, we needed to make them stretch for a month.

It was just your typical dining-table, biscuit-sliding, bank-guy, morning-chitchat – and then right in the middle of it, we heard a snorty, snouty, snrrrrrrrrkkkkk vibrating from the nearby bathroom. Followed by a growly, guttural, achhh-achhhh-achhhh. Followed by a long, drawn-out hoikkkkkkkkkkkkKKKKKK. A medley of greatest hits from legendary indie band, Teenage Son and The Phlegm-Summoners.

Anyone who has a teenage son, or has been a teenage son, or has spent time in the company of a teenage son, knows that they collect a tremendous amount of goop in their sinal cavities – it’s either hormonal or they shove it up there as some kind of fashion thing. 

And unfortunately we have a bathroom that’s butted right up against our dining area – which is not so great if you’ve got people over and everyone has to sit at the dining table politely, listening to something that sounds like raw meat being sucked through a bong (which may be what’s going on in there. Kids try all kinds of stuff, you just don’t know).

Whoever designed our house was a monumental twit! Bathrooms and dining rooms involve opposite ends of the eating spectrum and do not belong together, like Crocs and socks, or high-flying geese and commercial airplane engines. 

But there’s nothing we can do about it: we’ve tried sound-proofing the bathroom with cork tiles but it didn’t make any difference – it just made the bathroom look like a scungy inner-city recording studio with a soap-dish. 

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We’ve tried replacing the thin, hollow bathroom door with a super-heavy, super-thick, solid-wood one but the sound still leaked through – and now it takes two people to push open the door, running at it with their shoulders. 

We even considered sound-proofing our son, double-glazing his nasal passages and silicone-sealing his sinuses, but we couldn’t find a tradie who’d do the job, not even on Airtasker.

So we just have to live with this problem, and anytime we have a dinner party, or there’s people around, and someone needs to use the bathroom, my wife and I must immediately initiate our Emergency Bathroom-Noise-Muffling Procedure, designed to drown out all nose snorts, toilet flushes, and Mexi-bean incidents. 

First we try talking loud and fast. If that doesn’t work, we turn the stereo up to max. If it’s still bad, I’ll go and get the blender and crush ice at the table then ask if anyone’s in the mood for a daiquiri. 

Thankfully the bank guy was in the mood. I made him a small one. Without the maraschino liqueur. We can’t afford it.