twist and turn and down, down down

The roller coaster rolls onward...

Last week we hired the service of a carpet repair person to repair some damages our wonder dog Hamlet caused...long story. He came over, tested the carpet and said the padding would have to be replaced, the carpet steamed and cleaned and treated, and tacked back down. Expensive, but not so bad...we made an appointment for this morning to have the work done.

When he pulled back the carpet from the wall to replace the padding, Scott and I heard gasps. He found some more damage behind where the home theater resides...not just the carpet and padding, but the wall, the concrete foundation, the baseboard...and it was all still wet. (Do you happen to remember last year when we had some parts of our 2nd bathroom repaired/replaced because it had caused great damage to the wall, the carpet and the baseboard?)

Well--it turns out that our master bathroom (4 years old) shower has a leak--and the leak has been traveling through the wall down the studs, and what wasn't absorbed by the studs went on down to the floor, getting absorbed into the concrete foundation. Yup. We're going through it again.

Last time, it was a couple hundred dollars to fix everything. This time? Oh, that is not all, oh, no, that is not all...for unrelated reasons we also need to replace the piping in the shower, since when the house was built, the copper pipe was attached to the rebar, then never detached after the copper pipe was stabilized. Evidently this is very bad, as when rebar stays in contact with copper the copper immediately begins to disintegrate.

Lucky us, it has lasted 40 years. Gee--I think it would have been better to self destruct say, 16 years ago...before we bought the house! However, the copper piping alone will cost "about" $5,000. Yep that's Five THOUSAND dollars. Let's see...add to that $2000 for the shower tile to be replaced, and sealed...we're up to about $7,000 and that's not counting the additional carpet restoration that will need doing!

So, now, our whole house is disrupted again, waiting for plumbers, drywall guys carpenters to all come and fix it. Makes me wish I was a general contractor!

It's ok--I can feel the roller coaster leveling out--we'll do like others do; throw a bunch of money (or credit cards) at it and it will be good as new. Right? Right.

I'm thankful for many things---first that we didn't find all this on the morning of the dinner with our English friends. Second and maybe even bigger, that we didn't try to have all this done before our Couples' Party! Third, and isn't this ironic, Scott learned that Hamlet was the least of our carpet worries. I'm very thankful that we won't be giving up our family dog, and I told Scott he has to be nice to our Hammy for awhile.

I'm also very grateful that we have this time together to confront challenges like this as a team, and not me alone calling Scott on the phone, hearing him get really upset and then having to deal with all the labor people by myself. Thank you, Scott.

Tomorrow will be a better day. The laundry is nearly done; dinner is cooked eaten and dishes put away; Em will play her first T-ball game this Saturday.

It's all good.