A Series of Unfortunate Events

I wish I'd made this blog entry last weekend, so that it would be a prompt recording of the previous week, but I never did get around to making it happen. Still, with all the good vibes and happy passage of weeks with this project, I'd say it's all gone incredibly smoothly and mostly hitch-free. So it's hard to be too very upset at a strange confluence of unfortunate events in the Ides of February. And it was nothing crippling or devastating, but it does bear reporting for all interested parties who check this site from time to time...

When The Hero Falls. My General Contractor Pete was up in the attic but almost, suddenly, catastrophically, very nearly wasn't in the attic. When his foot broke through the sheetrock of the ceiling in the upstairs hallway and his body dropped down, it slammed his weight to one side and he thought he might even have broken his thigh bone. The foolish internist in the ER back home actually read his X-ray that way but, thank goodness, his orthopedist was able to give him the more accurate diagnosis: a deep muscle bruise, contusion, and some torn muscle tissue. He felt pretty banged up, no doubt.

Pipe Down! The efficient work of the sheetrock team was a delight to watch, and they did a pretty nice job of working around the temporary plumbing that allows me to still have a working bathroom and shower in a back bedroom upstairs. Alas, it turns out that there was a dreadful oversight by the plumbers when they set all that up: they did not glue and seal the PVC pipe for the tub/shower drain, and it was easy for this to be knocked loose when the sheetrock work was occurring all around it. Anyone care to guess how such a de-coupling of drain lines is most likely to be discovered? When the total output of one's evening shower ends up in the dining room below, instead of safely deposited into the city's sewer system. This was the same evening of Pete's fall through the ceiling, when he had been told he had a cracked femur, so he dispatched his wife Esther and Robert from his crew to come do clean-up. Most of the water seeped through the parquet floor in the dining room and ended up in the cellar, giving a good dousing to the newly-installed under-house insulation. Here's a shot of a remarkably upbeat Esther manning the shop vac as they got up as much of the water as they could.



Speaking of the plumbing subcontractor, during this week of bumps and bumbles, Pete reported to me that he's closed down his business. He'll still finish up this job but the economic downturn has left him unable to continue operation of his plumbing firm.

Pussy Galore. In an earlier post, I described the work being done on the exposed side porch, where one would mount stairs to come up to the front door from the parking area. The fact that ripping off that portion opened up access to the area beneath the porch, and (thanks to foundation vent holes) to the cellar as well, had not yet presented itself as a problem. Then came a stray cat tooling around the neighborhood. That cat found its way in through this breach in the house's defenses and managed to spray pretty much the entire cellar, and it stunk to high heaven, and then some. The guys now have the opening blocked off so that we'll not have a repeat of this, but that was one thorough pussy.

In-Securities. A couple of things went wrong with the security system in the house this week: (1) the insulation crew unplugged the main panel box, unbeknownst to me, and once the battery back-up was drained I ended up with a dead system. (2) the circuit board crapped out and so my system was not communicating with dispatch. Fortunately, it's a leased system, so the good folks with Radar Security Alarm, Inc., took care of it pronto and all is well again, safe and sound.

So, that's the week that was. As I've droned on about in other posts, this has been an incredibly stress-free project, for the most part, and I'm certainly not getting all bent out of shape or ulcer-fied by these things. The hardest stress for me, besides all that water dumped into the dining room, is how uncontrollable all the sheetrock and sanding dust seems to be...the house is absolutely covered in it, and I dread the feeling of futility that will accompany a succession of efforts to combat it.

Thank goodness I get my Swiffer Dusters in bulk from Sam's Club.

And it would be wise to thank goodness for a range of other good things from that week: the weather was very beautiful, with incredibly warm temps (low 70s) and sunny days. The birds were back in force, including a flock of blue jays and a return of a cardinal couple. The drywall and mudwork are all now completed, insulation has been placed in all walls and hung underneath both the old and new areas of the house, and they'll soon blow in the attic insulation. The HVAC team is continuing to make progress in fits and starts, but we're nearly ready to hook up the new upstairs system. Exterior trimwork was just about finished and a lot of the priming of that had been done before I left for this week's work in Virginia. So a rough week in some ways, and then plenty more good news to report as well.