Season 3 Episode 5: A Dump of My Own

January 8, 1989

Published 01/08/89

The upstairs toilet floods one time too many, and Al finally builds himself a bathroom in the garage. It is the realisation of an ambition he first voiced in season one’s “Whose Room Is It Anyway?“, where he described wanting a room where he could relax and read the paper and Peggy correctly identified what he was describing. Two seasons later he gets it, and the episode treats the achievement with complete sincerity.

This is also where the Ferguson toilet enters the series. Al discusses it here for the first time, and the fixture became a recurring object of devotion across the next eight years, one of the handful of things in his life he was unambiguously proud of. The garage bathroom gave the show a new room to use and gave the character something the house had never offered him, which is a door he could close.

The episode is unusually warm about it. There is no late reversal in which the bathroom is destroyed or taken away; Al wanted a space of his own, he built one badly, and he keeps it. For a series whose default setting was to deny its protagonist everything, that is a notable exception, and it is why the Ferguson stayed funny for so long afterwards.

Two pieces of continuity sit in the margins. Steve recalls that Al killed their goldfish while using the Rhoades’ bathroom, which matches the fish Al admitted to in season two’s “Build a Better Mousetrap.” And Bud asks after his missing skateboard, with Peggy implying she sold it for lottery money, though it turns up back in its spot on the staircase two episodes later.