We hired a house cleaner to come visit Our Humble O’Bode yesterday. This is a first for us. Before this, we cleaned house every two or three weeks, because we hate doing it, and because we wanted the weekends to do whatever we wanted, instead of spending hours on Saturday or Sunday cleaning. So B booked a visit with a service right here in Monona, and a house cleaner came by at nine.
With nothing to do for a couple of hours, we lounged like lords on the sofa while we finished our coffee, then got dressed and drove down the road to the local Kohl’s store to buy some new sheets for the bed. Wandering through the housewares section of the store reminded us that we should replace our tatty bath towels, so we picked out a few of those, too, as well as a new shower curtain. We were back home with the swag about an hour and a half later.
When we came through the door, the first thing I noticed was the sound of running water. It sounded a lot like the wash machine was filling up, and I wondered if the house cleaner was getting ready to wash cleaning rags, but as I stepped further into the house I could tell that the splash I heard wasn’t coming from the wash machine. It seemed to be coming from the other end of the house. Why was she filling the tub? I headed toward the bathroom, just to take a look, and then, when I was in the living room, I realized what was going on and stayed to run, as much as you can run through a room full of furniture.
The toilet was overflowing. It gets plugged easily and when it does, the water keeps running. When it did this a couple months ago, the water ran down into the vent cut into the floor, and from there into the basement. It was one hell of a mess to clean up then, and that time we shut off the water almost as soon as it overflowed. I had no idea how long water had been running into the vent this time, but when I got down the stairs to the basement, where I could see water running like a river pay the bar of the stairs, I could guess the toilet had probably been overflowing since we left about an hour earlier.
One of the previous owners had done a pretty good job of finishing part of the basement into a room. He framed a wall to divide a corner from the rest of the basement, then put in a drop ceiling, finishing it off with sheet rock. I’d added overhead florescent lights, book cases, a desk, and in the back half of the room I’d started to build the model train set of my dreams.
The water from the bathroom had run down onto the sheet rock ceiling, then spread across the length and breadth of the room. It came raining down through every hole I’d drilled in the ceiling to hang overhead lamps, or attach book shelves. Water ran from an overhead vent as if it were a spigot cranked wide open.
How do you even begin to clean up a mess like that? Well, if you have home owner’s insurance, which we had the foresight to get, then you don’t have to clean it up. You just call the hot line and your insurance company will send people to clean it up for you. Not only will they clean it up, they’ll also set up six industrial fans and two oven-sized dehumidifiers to dry everything out.
All credit for thinking of calling the insurance company goes to My Darling B, by the way. While I was slogging through the mess in the basement, wondering what to do and how to do it, she got in the phone to find out what the insurance would cover, and was soon advising me to cease and desist because the cavalry was on the way. An hour later, two young and very capable people were at our door to survey the situation, clean up the mess, and install the fans and dehumidifiers.
They even managed to save a lot of the books and record albums that got wet. And mercifully few of then got wet, as it turned out. I was sure they were all goners, but the damaged books were all in the one book shelf over the record album collection. The water missed all the other books, and there were lots of them. How lucky was that?
So that was my weekend. How was yours?
This Is Drivel 