Rule #3: When it rains, it pours
Last week, when we returned from vacation, I tried to turn on my computer to pay some bills. Imagine my despair when it refused to boot! Being a Mac, my husband doesn't really know how to troubleshoot the problem, so we put off fixing it, since we had other things to do and I can still access email and the web on my phone.
But, then, the thunder started to roll ominously...
My husband and I got a notice from our insurance company that our home insurance was being cancelled due to non-compliance. We're like, "WTF, what have we not complied with?!?", so I called the company and found out that they had a report from our home inspection that had a list of to-dos on it that was supposedly sent in June. We never got it and they were really uppity and cranky about it, acting like they were doing us a huge favour by resending it and by giving us an extension (until September 30) to fix things.
They said they sent the report registered mail, they lied. They said they'd resend it registered, they didn't. But, at least we got it this time.
Anyway, one of the things on the list is that our fireplace didn't have enough clearance from the door to the end of the hearth. So, we had two choices: put tile down in front of the hearth (and use up even more of our living room) or take down the ridiculous, huge facing and tile over the original structure where the old facing was and on the floor that would be uncovered by removing the facing.
After some thought, we decided on the second option, since we hated the huge facing. And believe me when I say it was huge. In fact, here's a picture (part of it is disassembled in this shot - my husband sent it to me as he was working on taking down the facing. Imagine this picture with wood paneling above the stone where the bricks are, plus the same wood paneling/stone combo on the "wings".
Since we couldn't do the work with a baby around, I packed Little L up and took him to my parent's cottage on Friday so my husband could take down the facing.
Throughout the day, he sent me pictures of his progress, and once he got the facing down, it was obvious that we couldn't easily fix up the structure underneath to go with our plan of tiling everything. It was a huge mess.
My Dad and brother-in-law heard what was going on and went over to help on Saturday. They took one look at the crumbling fireplace/chimney/huge mess and told my husband to tear it down. It was that bad.
They spent all day Saturday tearing things down, then came up to the cottage late Saturday night so that they could spend Sunday recovering. On Monday, I went back to the house with the three of them to finish tearing it down, while my mom babysat Little L. It took us all day to finish.
Our house is a disaster area. Everything is coated in dust. We are going to have to scrub the walls, the floors, the furniture, the cabinets and every surface, plus wash all the clothes/linens and clean all the dishes.
My husband, Little L and I slept at my parent's farm last night and today we (my husband and I) feel ill and have horribly sore throats, despite wearing dust masks.
We spent the morning choosing and ordering a new stand-alone wood stove and chimney (complete with a gate that will surround it to prevent Little L from burning himself) then went back to the house to start the immense task of cleaning all. the. things.
After hours of work, I have the kitchen half done and my husband has scrubbed the upstairs walls, vacuumed and started working on patching the hole in our roof.
We still have to deal with the rest of the things on the insurance company's list, fix my poor, neglected computer, find a new insurance company (after the way they treated us and their added demands that we hire inspectors for every repair - hundreds of dollars in added costs - we're dropping them as fast as we can. We are doing the things on the list, though, so that we can pass the new company's inspection), finishing fixing our roof, fix the wall, floor and ceiling in the guest bedroom (where we accessed the chimney on the second floor), fix the living room wall and fix the living room floor/prepare it for the new stove.
My poor husband. He starts a new job next week and took this week off to do a few things around the house and to spend time with his family. His time off isn't so fun anymore.
*sigh*
So that's our sorry story. Sorry about the ranting. Hopefully next week I'll be able to post a fun story about our vacation.
Here's hoping!
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