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| The pit…of despair… |
Apparently I keyed into something cosmic on Thursday. Either that, or I taunted fate something awful with my tales o’ bodily fluids.
Because the very next day our sewer pipe collapsed.
Thankfully, we [now] have a very good plumber. (For those of you playing along at home, yes we have collected plumbers like little kids collect…whatever the heck it is that kids collect these days. Jacks? Worry dolls? I have no idea.) The plumbers are called The Scottish Plumber (actual tagline: “The pipes, the pipes are calling.” Peej may not think that’s the reason we went with them, but he’d be wrong.)
They came immediately on Thursday morning and did a swell job of instantaneously pointing out [at least] four places where our home is broken. Like under the laundry room. The Harry Potter storage closet. The playroom wall. The entirety of the bathroom. Because not only did the sewer line give out, but in doing so, it helpfully pointed out other areas that were less than “airtight.”
In fact, when the plumbers jackhammered up all of the ceramic tile and concrete in the bathroom, they discovered an actual cesspool beneath the toilet. There was evidence of animal activity that shall not be mentioned ever again. And there was room for at least four bodies. You know how there’s supposed to be pipes and concrete and very little to no space at all between things under any given house? There was NOTHING but space. It was like opening a door into a swirling vortex. Like in Ghostbusters. But way stankier.
The jackhammering also had the effect of covering every inch of our home with multiple layers of dirt and dust. There was a moment where I felt like an actual resident of Pompeii. And by Friday night I had mopped every square inch of [non-destroyed] space TWICE. And Nora still slipped on a dusty stair.
The lower level of our home is, well, to quote a James Taylor song: “Tore up, and tore up good.” This is the floor that, besides the bathroom, laundry, and playroom, houses the guest room/P.J.’s office, and that random room (which had previously been hosting Mold-O-Rama 2011- and is now so fresh and so clean clean with new drywall and paint…just in time to potentially get ripped up again).
We have no TV.
There is limited access to Nora and Zuzu’s toys, some of which I grabbed and stacked in the living room. And, if you’ll recall, the living room is perhaps the only room in the house where we don’t have bibs and diapers and miniature cars strewn around. (Except for this week!)
And did I mention that we’ve got people coming for a long weekend on Thursday? We’ve got people coming for a long weekend on Thursday! Maybe I’ll set up a tent in the backyard. (For myself.)
Over the weekend, we were allowed to run hot water but had no access to the laundry (oh, darn), but the steam from the hot water made the smells more smelly. And since the only thing separating us from raw sewage were gaping holes that had been covered in plywood, they weren’t awfully effective at containing THE WORST SMELL THAT HAS EVER BEEN IN MY NOSE, EVER.
And this afternoon I get to meet with an insurance adjuster (who has already attempted to dissuade us from filing a claim on the grounds that, whether or not we get a payout, our rates will definitely go up). Hopefully she will see that the work being done is not “cosmetic,” nor is it something I’ve done to the house.
I’m pretty sure that, were I a swarm of frothing demons being chased by locusts, I would not have been able to inflict this kind of damage to my own abode.
I bet it would smell better, though.
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