Chock Full of Brocktastic Goodness!

2004-10-27 - 11:04 p.m.

This is Part 2 of the "Lost Entries from September." Hopefully I will be able to update again soon and get caught all the way up to the end of October! (Not too much happened, so it shouldn't be hard.)

Here Comes the Rain Again

September 17

Silly me! Thinking that sweeping the roof off the bathroom floor was "crazy." What's crazy is waking up going into the bathroom (the one and only/original/working bathroom in the house) and looking up to see the sky.Through. The. Ceiling. Or, through what used to be a ceiling and is now just a hole in a part of the house that shouldn't have a hole.

Yesterday was a hugely stressful day. I can't even remember it all but I recall writing a check for over $10,800 for windows and doors (still waiting on 2 doors and that's just the exterior doors!), but they only delivered $9,000 worth of stuff so I wrote a new check, obviously. Then later realized that the other $1,800 was probably for the stuff they delivered the day before that I hadn't paid for. Oh well, no invoice = no check and I didn't get an invoice for that one. So, that and various phone calls that I had to make made me half and hour late for work. No one at work cares, least of all my boss, but I hate being late, especially THAT late. So I stayed an extra half hour which made me have to run errands in less time than expected, which led to making stupid decisions and making wrong turns and making me late for a meeting with JD - the first time I've seen him in 2 weeks! Or so I thought. On my way home Phil called to have me pick up more paint for the trim (they want to paint the trim before roofing and shingling). This was fine except I neglected to mention to him that when I bought the first TWO gallons (which we thought would be enough) it came to over $90 and maybe we shouldn't buy paint at Eldredge anymore. So now we have the stress of being late again today, and the money stress, and a total of five gallons of "very good paint." (Benjamin Moore I'll get you for this!) I get home, try to de stress and get ready to rearrange the bathroom with JD (who is also running late, apparently, and has already blown off one meeting with me this week so who knows if he's even going to show).

Eventually JD calls and says he's on his way and will be here in about 40 minutes (and he's already late), but he's coming so I'm happy and I can relax until he gets here. When he gets here I find out I can't move the closet that I wanted to move. Not the end of the world, but I wish I had thought about it before it was too late. I also find out that I still can have a vaulted ceiling in the family room and if we do the dormer in the kids' room we can use the 2x10's (that are currently where the regular height ceiling will be hung from) for the rafters, so they won't be wasted. Gee, thanks, I was actually hoping you would say "yes" to the closet and "no" to the ceiling. Well, I'm saying "no" to both (and Phil said it would cost too much to heat that room if it had high ceilings anyway). So, we go up to the future kids'/guest bathroom and start figuring out where everything will go and that the shower can stay where it was and still have the window centered - phew! But there's going to be an enormous closet. Too enormous. It makes no sense. "Hmmm. What if we put the bathroom over there?" (Where Phil's office was going/where our bed used to be.) "I've thought about that, but it is hard to arrange with those slanty walls and I want to try to save the wallpaper in dining room, so we can't rip up those walls for the pipes." (The wallpaper is sort of the basis for all the colors in the downstairs and has been discontinued, so I can't just patch up what they wreck.) "OK, how about putting a small bathroom here and leaving Phil's office where it was going to be?" ("here" being where Phil's desk used to be) "Yes! Let's do that!" So we have just gained a whole 14'x14' room without really changing much! We will call it Phil's office during inspection and call his office a playroom, it won't have a closet (at first, anyway) since that would make it a "bedroom" and we can't call this a 4 bedroom house without getting a huge impact fee and having our taxes go up a ton (more than they already will).

That's awesome news! I'm so excited! TWO guest rooms! We could have more than one couple at a time stay here! Several if we use the pull out and the futon! (Eventually it will be one of the boys' rooms, but not til Todd's about 12.)

So everything is happy and destressed - everything being me, of course. We go to the Collins' to help set up the tent and things for the party on Saturday. We come home, put the kids to bed, Phil eventually goes up to sleep in Todd's bed since I am watching tv and printing up signs for the party. I go to "bed" on the couch around midnight. It has been raining lightly for a few hours with harder rain coming. Soon. Like around 1:30. When I wake up to the sound of rain in a place where rain shouldn't be.

Remember when I mentioned sweeping the roof off the bathroom floor? Well, where roof can fall so can rain. The guys threw a tarp over the houseward side of the new "guest room nee bathroom" but they missed the huge gaping hole in the roof over the current bathroom. What I heard was rain coming in through the ceiling fan. I found that, then noticed that the curtain was completely soaked top to bottom from water coming through the wall or trim seams or somewhere. I threw down some towels and grabbed some buckets but the water just came faster and faster so by 2 am I had to wake up Phil. When he got there the sheet rock tape was showing through the ceiling and water was dripping from the trim seams in the hall by the stairs. Phil ripped down a huge chunk of ceiling to try to keep the water coming into the bathroom and out of the hall but the rain was so hard and the insulation was so full of water that it just kept coming. He put our big trash cans under the pouring water in the bathroom and we put towels and pans under the drips in the hall. The pitch black and torrential downpours, at now 3 am, made it impossible for him to get on the roof and cover the hole. I went up to Todd's bed to read for about an hour and then as I was falling asleep heard a big bang down the road that turned out to be the cable going out on our street. (Poor Phil, who now couldn't sleep also couldn't watch tv.) When I got up in the morning Phil had called JD, moved the concrete so he could use the tarp that was covering it, and pulled out the wet insulation so you could see the sky through the ceiling of the bathroom. Let's call it a skylight! JD sent two guys out to put the tarp up and they were here for quite a while covering things the way it should have been done yesterday. I can't imagine that JD is too happy with his guys since he now has to replace ceiling in a room that he wasn't really even going to touch (other than take out the tub and put in the laundry).

See for yourselves: