Writing by Ear

I don’t really know why we look forward to the weekends. This last one started out having to spend an inordinate amount of time Saturday morning trying to compensate for other people’s jerkiness in the form of door dings/scratches in both our cars. Yes, in addition to my door ding at Cook Forest, Mike got a new giant one in his door as well — amazing that so many people are that thoughtless and careless. Thanks to my $20 eBay purchase a couple years ago of a dent puller-outer thingy, and Mike’s endless patience with such things, both cars look passable now and we saved the $300 or so it would have cost to fix them. Me — I would have left the dings. Like I said, Mike is the obsessive one about such things, lucky for me.

After that two hours of fun, it was “Clean the remaining filth from the sewer project out of the basement” time. To be fair, the plumbers did a really good job cleaning up the piles of dirt. But…they’re plumbers, not miracle workers or Martha wanna-bes. That meant we had the big fun of shop-vac’ing and then scrubbing down the concrete floor with bleachy-soapy water. YECH!

We were just feeling pretty good about that, and had the fan set up to dry the floor and all, when I hear Mike say, “Hey, where’s all this water coming from?”

Apparently, it was coming from the torrential (I mean torrential) rain that was not flowing into the downspout over the front porch (because we forgot to reconnect it after they finished excavating) but instead pouring like a waterfall into the still unfilled hole under the porch and then right through the foundation wall into the storage room of our basement (next to the laundry room we had just scrubbed). Muddy, sewery water. Flowing through the storage room toward the nonworking center drain in the middle of our basement landing at the bottom of the stairs that some previous owner-idiots had decided to cover up with carpet. Light beige carpet. Light beige impossible-to-clean-because-it’s-in-the-freakin’-cellar carpet. Oh, and that same carpet goes down the cellar stairs, so every time we or every workman on the planet needs to go down into the cellar…more dirt on said carpet. People’s stupidity in what they chose to do in this house never ceases to amaze.

So, while MIke was busy outside down in the mucky, muddy porch hole bailing filthy water, I tried to stem the flood inside. Fortunately, most of what we had stored in that room was in plastic bins — except for the approximately 700 cardboard boxes of all sizes we’ve been saving for “eBay shipping.” (I think we haven’t sold anything on eBay for, oh, a year or so. But boy, we are ready with boxes when the time comes.)

Another 2 hours later, time to throw in our wet, dirty towels for the night.

Sunday (the day of rest) was “rent the carpet scrubber” day. The instructions say something about not recommending making 2 passes, especially on berber-type carpet, because it will take forever to dry. I have to say, we made like 27 passes on that filthy cellar carpet and at least 4 passes on the stairs.

Fill up scrubber with clean water. Scrub, scrub, scrub. Empty filthy water. Fill up with clean water. Scrub, scrub, scrub. Empty filthy water. Fill up with clean water. Scrub, scrub, scrub. Empty filthy water. Again and again and again. You wonder, just how much filth can there be in one 5’x7′ carpet? The answer: More than you can ever imagine.

Yes, someday we’ll pull it all out and start over, but “fixing the cellar” is way, way low on the house project priority list. For now, it is what it is, come hell or high water. And it’s already been through both — a few times.

So another weekend fills a couple more pages in the “heinous chores we’ve had to do in fixing up this old house” scrapbook. Good times, people. Good times.

The tendency to whining and complaining may be taken as
the surest sign symptom of little souls and inferior intellects. 
                                                                     ~ Lord Jeffrey