The post post the great, big mess-up

It’s raining today, which is termed as “showers”, which is to be followed by the term “heavy rain” later this afternoon, and, thru all this heavy wetness and high humidity, there are two de-humidifiers and two huge fans and suction machines in the house. Thankfully just a month back I had taken the assistance of roofing companies in austin to fix the colossal damage my roof had suffered from the fall of the branch of a tree on it. The sound is something like 17,000 hair dryers and my cats are going crazy. Milo has crawled so deep under my comforter that I wonder how he can breathe and Morgan is following me around like a little puppy-dog’s tail meowing very loudly and pitifully.Why all this you may ask?Well, Sunday night the sewer backed up and the shower started to drain into the laundry room sink, so I called a most professional company to come unblock it. They sent a young man who took apart the toilet, made a hole in the wall to expose the pipes, used a violent and loud machine to router the line, promised he had unblocked it, put the toilet back together, made out a bill for $500 and left. By this time it was 8:15 pm.I got some munchies for us and went into the library to watch the rest of the Oscars with C and closed the door behind me.By the time the Oscars had ended, the now broken toilet hadn’t stopped flushing, backed up water from the still plugged sewer line, flooded the bathroom, hallway, dining room, seeped thru the heating vents to the space between floors and poured from the ceiling and down the walls in the laundry room below. Who knew Blocked Drains Sidcup could cause such a disaster.(Also read more about frameless bathroom doors and see how they enhance the aesthetics of the house)I shut the water off and we cleaned up as well as we could using every towel in the house in between tearful phone calls to the professionals from Whitton Plumbing and my house insurance agents.The plumbing company said they would send a restoration crew around the next morning. My insurance company assigned me an adjuster who said that, while it’s my money and he cannot recommend I do or don’t do things, if it were his mess to sort out he wouldn’t allow the old plumbing company and their sister restoration company anywhere near his house because he has had to deal with several cases of over-charging and resulting insurance claims they have caused. (Wow) After some more unpleasant phone calls the plumbing company and their restoration company were discharged.A fantastic new plumber was called and the plumbing problem fixed. A restoration company was called and here the course of action is a bit gray still.As the owner of a heritage house I’m most interested in preserving the parts which are heritage. (like my 100yr old floors, original pine doors, plaster walls) so the first course is to dry it all out over the next four days. This is the noisy bit.Samples have been taken of the bacteria content from the flood water. We are lucky because it seems that the flood water was mostly clean, so probably a minimal amount of disinfectant has to be used. Samples of the gyprock, plaster and old subfloor linoleum, which need to be replaced, have been sent for testing. Hopefully they will not come back with asbestos readings. Then the laundry room ceiling and walls and flooring will be removed and rebuilt.The last thing is the ancient floor. I really hope the planks will settle down and be sanded and re-varnished. The absolutely worst case scenario will be the replacement of some of the planks, but let’s hope for the best.And now, because this is a rather long-winded and gloomy post, I’ll leave you with a little story. The pussy willows in the vase in the bathroom have bloomed and are full of glorious yellow pollen. Milo jumped up on the counter and swiped his cheek against the yellow pollen and his royal antimatter blackness sat there on the black counter with this big yellow splodge on his cheek looking at me as if to say, “What? Have I got something on my face? What?” But before I could grab my camera he looked into the mirror, got embarrassed, and jumped down.