Cosmic Joke

I'm still waiting for the punch line. I think it has something to do with a house collapsing on my head.

So...I had a productive week last week. My brother was enormously helpful both as a fellow worker and musclebound laborer. Much of my week was spent organizing and hiring plumbers, contractors, tree removal people, lawn maintenance., etc. After my brother returned home and most of the work I had hired out was finished, I began painting the interior of my father's home.

I rented a paint sprayer and went from room to room dressed up in a hat, goggles, and a haz-mat-looking paper suit. I finished all the ceilings in about an hour.

Playing with power tools is fun!

It took me much longer to begin painting the walls the old-fashioned way---with a roller and paint brush.

I left my dad's place feeling quite pleased with myself and hopeful that things would continue in the same way, with ease and rapidity.

While I was gone DH reported that The Rationalist had accidentally knocked down a bunch of tiles in the bathroom that he and The Intuitive use. We weren't upset with him because we knew that the bathroom needed work and it was only a matter of time before we were going to have to do it.

When I arrived home and checked the shower out, I was dismayed. When our house was built, the builders did not install cement board in the bathrooms, but instead put in green board....which is basically just drywall with a special "moisture resistant" paper on the front of it. The drywall had soaked up water for God only knows how long.

I began tearing it all out, discovering it was completely infested with black mold.

what fun.

Here's what our guest bathroom looks like now:

I still have a lot more to tear out. I've armed myself with a mask, goggles and gloves and closed off the bathroom from the rest of the house as much as possible.

This is going to be a huge PITA to deal with.

Working on my dad's house has been fun in a strange way...because we have had the funds to hire people and purchase the materials needed for the house repairs.....all thanks to my dad's retirement savings.

It's not as much fun when you have to do the same things to your own home with no money to fund the project, although taking a hammer to tile and drywall does seem to have a satisfying element to it. The only good thing is that I know exactly what has to be done to fix our house and in what order.

I guess the timing is right for this unmitigated bathroom disaster, as far as having acquired the appropriate knowledge goes. I just wish the timing was equally as right financially.

Sadly, I think my blog topics in the near future are all going to be about the ensuing hilarity of me and DH fixing our bathroom and my dad's bathrooms all by ourselves.

If the stress doesn't get to us...the toxic mold probably will.

DH and I don't exactly have the best track record for working together on projects around the house. Putting up blinds, painting walls and patching drywall could land us in divorce court infinitely more easily than an affair or financial issues ever could. We're able to work well in almost every other area of our lives, but put a hammer or screwdriver in our hands and suddenly communication breaks down and becomes a series of grunts and irritated sighs.

We butt heads. We're too much alike. We both are take-charge kind of people.

To surmount this marital obstacle, we usually delegate projects and only work on things jointly that are simply impossible to do alone. However, after almost 12 years of marriage, we may have finally conquered our territorial leanings.

We repaired the duct work in our attic.....ourselves....together...without a single argument....with nary a bad mood.

We have either evolved, or simply gotten too old to care about fighting.

Ashes to Ashes

The past couple of days were spent at my father's house, starting the reconstruction process.....actually more like deconstruction.

The contractor spent all day Monday opening up the walls in the house, removing the drywall and insulation, exposing the wood framing and studs.

It wasn't good.  Around every window the studs had been reduced to ash and disintegrated at the mere touch of a finger.  How the windows managed to even stay in the walls, I'm not really sure. Some of the studs in the wall, further away from the windows, were still pristine, so not everything is a loss.

The next step involves hiring an engineer to determine what needs to be done to ensure the structural integrity of the house.  The report he writes will determine what we wind up doing with the house.  If it will be too costly to repair, we may have to sell it "as is" to an investor at a shockingly low price.

I should have taken pictures to scare all you homeowners out there.

Take my advice...don't mess around with termites.  If you think you have them, deal with it immediately.  

Plumbing Drama, Day 2 and 3

Yesterday, the plumbers arrived at 7 am and didn't leave until 10:30 pm.  It was an exhausting day and I wasn't even the one doing the manual labor.

Apparently, the plumbing company hired the three stooges to work for them, minus one stooge. That is not to say that they were incompetent, but that I swore that at any moment a fist fight was going to break out.  Lots of yelling.  Lots of name-calling.  Lots of mumbling under their breath at one another.  All that was missing was Curly's "woo..woo..woo" and "nyuck...nyuck...nyuck" and Moe's signature slap to the head of whomever was closest to him.

The senior plumber kept taunting the younger one calling him a little girl, stupid, idiot...etc.  It was breathtaking how much of a jerk he was being.  What made it funnier/worse is that the younger one would let the curse words fly when he became frustrated.  The senior, emotionally abusive, plumber would then tell the younger one to watch his language.  I guess in his economy yelling, "F@ck" at a pipe is worse than insulting another's manhood and constantly berating him throughout the day.

Most of these tantrums took place when the plumbers thought I wasn't around or couldn't hear them, but sound carries through the ventilation shafts when you're in the attic yelling at the top of your lungs.  By the end of the day I was happy to see them go.  They were always very nice when speaking to me, but the tension between the two of them had me frazzled.

My reward for listening to their bickering for 2 days was a hot shower after they left.  

We now have water!  Not only do we have water, but it is actually contained in pipes and not running out all over the floor or inside walls.  It's a joyous occasion

The plumbing inspector is supposed to swing by today to check everything out and make sure it's up to code. After that, we have to repair several holes in the drywall. 

We have vaulted ceilings and when the house was built, at the normal ceiling height, two 2 x 4 boards were laid horizontally from which the vaulted part of the house was built upwards.  This meant that the plumbers couldn't slide pipes down the walls, because the walls were blocked off.  They had to open the walls, drill holes through the 2 x 4's and then slide the pipes through the holes. This contributed to the already foul mood between them as they tried to snake a pipe with a diameter about the size of a quarter down several feet from the attic and through a similarly sized hole.  It was a two-person job, requiring teamwork, so you can imagine how that went.

Here's hoping I never have to call another plumber for a very long time.

Plumbing Drama, Day One

Right now there are two grown men crawling through my attic, trying to snake PVC pipes down through our walls in order to bring an end to the tyranny wielded over us by our copper pipes.

Earlier, an hour into the project, we heard the word no homeowner ever wants to hear..."Oops!"

Um, yeah.  That's not where that pipe was supposed to go.

Home Is Where the Money Goes

So my house has been in a drawn-out conspiracy to slowly break my spirit, regularly employing my appliances in the vicious scheme.  

My bubble-gum repair, which is amazingly still holding up after almost a week has gone by, is a cry for help in the battle of home ownership. Desperate times; desperate measures and all that.

Tomorrow I have the privilege of having several plumbers come and give me estimates for re-plumbing our house in anything other than copper pipes. I'd take a Roman aqueduct as a replacement at this point.  

To add to the fun, just before the latest leak, my washing machine decided to break....not all the way, mind you. No, it still works, but only on medium loads.....every other Monday. It refuses to spin consistently, waiting until Venus and Mercury are properly aligned before choosing to put forth an effort. It's like my first car; it functions, but you have to know all the secrets and tricks to get it going. It's useless in inexperienced hands.

The most frustrating thing for me is rooted firmly in my own superficiality.  For several years I have been wanting to update our house; new sofa, repainting outside and in, redo the bathrooms..etc.  I've wanted to make our home more like Better Homes and Gardens, and less like Hand-Me-Down Chic.  I resent having to spend so much money on practical things like roofs, air conditioners, and new plumbing.  I want hard-wood floors and a new sofa, not PVC pipes.

Yet, every time I get to the point of moving forward with a home improvement project, instead of home repair projects, one of these "events" happens.  It's like the house is secretly listening to my plans and finds ways to divert the resources for its own structural good, leaving my grandiose decorating plans in the dust.

At any moment I expect to see the walls breathing like all the houses in the numerous B horror movies I watched as a child....Amityville eyes and all.

You might be a redneck if....

you fix your pipes with bubble gum and electrical tape.

Orbit Citrusmint just in case you were wondering.

Aaaaargghhh!

New job = enough money to comfortably meet our monthly budget and begin saving/paying down debt.

Copper pipes with crappy mineralized water = a $300 repair that also left a gaping hole in our masonry block and stucco house.

My first paycheck on 9/21 = money we'll never see.

Plumbing problems = completely frustrated me!

:-P