Through Gritted Teeth

Today I came home from picking up the kids at school and my floor was missing. Yes, my floor. In exchange for my missing floor, I was left with a thick layer of dust on every flat (and not-so-flat, read: grapes and bananas) surface.

I wasn't surprised to find my floor missing, but I was surprised (which you could interpret: stunned, irritated, flabbergasted) to see the dust. Now, I'm not a professional floor remover, but shouldn't a rule of the trade be to cover things before you're about to create such a mess? Especially electronics such as TVs, DVD players, etc.?

Let me go back to the beginning of the story for a bit. When we moved into this house in June of last year, we decided to have the salmon-coloured, blackened-grouted tile removed from our entire main floor. Not really our thing. The idea was to have this work done before we moved all our stuff into the house, as we had some overlap with possession dates. A smart move indeed, as it was a disgusting, noisy, dusty, ridiculous process. However, we were very happy with the results of our new hardwood.

Fast forward now to October, when Connor shouts up from the basement one relaxing Sunday afternoon, "Why is the ceiling (and wall and floor and couch) all wet? Why is there water coming out of the ceiling?" It turns out that a nail had been hammered into a pipe behind the bathroom on the main floor (likely when the hardwood was put in in June) and that pipe had decided to burst that particular morning while we were out at church. Really, no rhyme or reason to it.

Many frustrating phone calls and service people and weeks later, we finally have the basement all fixed up. (For a little extra fun, while the wall was exposed in the basement, we discovered an unrelated crack in the foundation, which we subsequently had fixed.) There's all new laminate, drywall, paint, and the door to the bathroom even closes! (no thanks to the guy who decided to reattach the door but not bother to make sure it closed.) Progress is being made.

Finally, it's time to replace the area on the main floor outside the bathroom with some new hardwood, where the wood had buckled. (Just remembered - I forgot to tell you about the 3 industrial fans we had sucking up every last bit of moisture in the floor and walls and our skin for 4 days back in October. Imagine a 747 and all its friends taking off from your powder room for 4 days straight - somehow we stayed sane!) The flooring guys come in with all their gear and are ready to get to work, but wait. The wood they've just laid out DOESN'T MATCH the rest of the floor. It's going to look ridiculous to have it patched up with non-matching wood.

Ok, so now's it's 6 weeks (or 6 years, I don't know anymore) later, which brings us to yesterday and a constant parade of different people through the house, packing up boxes - did I forget to tell you that at the same time we had the hardwood floors put in, we also had some extra pantry cabinets and an island put in to give us some extra space?, well these now have to be completely emptied, dismantled and removed, so they can rip out the wood underneath - taking off the baseboards and generally getting the house ready for the floors to be removed. When I left my house yesterday for work, I said to the very friendly, chatty, sketchy-looking guy who was removing my baseboards, "Be sure to lock up when you leave." Which he did.

Today, while I was out, yet more mystery people were in my house, removing the boards and not covering anything up while leaving thick layers of dust on virtually everything. Yes, my bananas, my grapes, my wedding photo album. Nothing was left out.

So where does this leave me? Well, the work should be done by Friday, for starters. We should be tired of take-out pizza by then. I'm counting on another parade of people to come back, this time to replace my island and pantry, then unpack all the boxes into the cupboards and drawers, and hopefully do a bang-up job of removing the dust. I've always hated dusting (it's the last job I tend to get to), so my nemesis has come to haunt me.

I'm trying to find some lessons to be learned through all this. I'm thinking of something along the lines of the-more-stuff-you-have-the-more-that-can-go-wrong. That's not really going to help me much at this point.

And so, I smile through gritted (and gritty - there's a lot of dust in the air) teeth and say, "Thank goodness for house insurance!"