12) “Little” Problems

“You’re not going to believe this but… we’ve got a problem.”

You take a deep breath, bracing for this new unknown… you’ve got plenty of problems with the problems you already know about… what could this new issue be? How much is this going to cost… is the real question, you think to yourself.

“There’s no hot water.”

“Wait… what? No hot water? What’s going on?”

“I have no clue but… there’s no hot water. We’re going to have to get a plumber out here in the morning.”

You’re a 2x a day shower gal on any old regular day… but today was no regular day, you are absolutely filthy from both the move and the beginning of the long cleaning process… you smell like dirt and sweat, and now… possibly a bit of desperation.

This water is COLD. You are nasty. This is an issue.

Later you stand in the bathroom, not quite nude, not quite dressed… your hand is under the shower head, after five minutes of running the water and the audacity of hope as you held your hand under the faucet willing the water to warm… trying to pretend that it’s not still just as frigid as when you started and after a few minutes of a useless open hot water tap… you sigh loudly, “Fuck.”

You remember packing up the box from your studio, the one with the instant hot water pot. You head down to the sanctuary where you quickly rummage through the hoard of boxes… it’s not long before you find it and thank your lucky fucking stars as you run back upstairs.

You have to laugh as you stand naked and freezing in the middle of your bathroom, chilled to the bone, your feet on the cold slate floor, not quite sure how to clean up both efficiently and as warmly as possible. Look at you… a wash rag, steaming hot water, and the resolve that next time you buy a vacant property sight unseen, that maybe you should turn on the shower and get a plumber out there first thing? Pffft…

You’re cleaned as quickly as possible, your skin covered in goose flesh, still feeling a bit sticky from soap… no matter how many times you use the warm wash cloth and clean water to rinse off, you’re still feeling gross… not quite AS gross as you were… but not quite clean either.

It’s going to have to be ‘good enough’ for tonight.

You never sleep that well in a new place… and this is no different… every creak… every groan… you wonder if the kids are ok down in the sanctuary… you wonder if you’re ok up here… ridiculously you hope not to be visited by three ghostly spirits in the night… You toss and turn all night. You sleep lightly, so different from your normal evenings… now every sound, every car, every voice under the open window starts you wide awake from your fitful slumber.

In the morning you skip the rag wash and get dressed straight away. You’ve been fantasizing about a steamy shower ever since you finished unpacking the U-Haul in the cold rain… those plumbers can not get here soon enough.

Downstairs in the kitchen you go over the game plan with your husband and best friend; the kids are upstairs in the sanctuary glued to screens, their beds made but still on the floor. There are groceries in the fridge (you’re so happy that the fridge is still running), but you’re currently without an oven. The little griddle you brought from home is a temporary fix and you’re thankful that you have to work with a griddle vs a cooler and dry ice.

You’ve discovered that the washer and dryer are deader than dead… one working appliance out of the entire house, the leaks you know about in the sanctuary, whatever the fuck is going on in the basement (that wet earthy, musty, moldy smell is still permeating the place even with yesterday’s rain long gone), the DOA water heater… that’s doable. All of it is. The plumber will be here soon, you’ve got a game plan, the dumpster (that you’re thinking might just be overkill on your husband’s part, but you never (luckily) bring that up) will be here by the afternoon…

After breakfast your husband and best friend begin the demo process. The plan of attack will be starting in the basement, removing the little bit of moldy drywall on the south wall of the building (easy peasy), and then any moldy drywall in the stairwell heading to the basement. You’re in charge of cleaning all usable living spaces as they are caked in at least five years of unattended to dust and dirt. You’re also pretty certain that you will have the basement done, completed, ready to live in… within just a few weeks.

Except that’s not what was going to happen at all…

While you clean they get to work on the moldy spot… Meanwhile you were oblivious: cleaning years of dirt using the one working water source in the entire place (on the second floor… back and forth… back and forth… back and forth… the clean water quickly turning chocolate brown after a few passes with the mop or rag… over and over and over… back and forth…).

While you clean upstairs, in the basement the entire north and south walls are torn down to the studs… the construction is odd… there are multiple layers of paint; old ‘fixes’ consisting of weird framed metal screens built into the walls (that none of you have quite figured out were used to ‘vent’ a leaking wall yet); old stained glass painted and back filled with concrete; forty year old pieces of thin sheet metal with newspaper pages printed onto it (your husband tells you this was some sort of short lived, weird 1980s craft.. replaced later by diy rag dolls and lamp shades no doubt); and mold. So much mold. It’s on the walls, it’s on the framing, it’s everywhere.

Later that afternoon you head back to the basement. The three of you are there assessing the mess on your hands. The massive dumpster delivered earlier in the day, no longer seems like fucked up overkill… the dumpster seems too small actually.

Right now there is nothing but old wood framing that clings to various layers of the wall… made up of the building’s exterior stone, then concrete, with an exceptionally well done plaster job, and finally at least five thick layers of paint… on top of that: the framing (moldy and gross) and the drywall (now in broken chunks, piled around the massive basement).

“It’s gotta come down.”

“All of it?” You grasp at the hope of saving any of this.

“I don’t know Vaness… (he always leaves off the ‘a’ at the end whenever a change in conversational direction is headed your way)… there’s a lot of mold. But you make the call…”

“Well… what do you think?” You ask them both, your husband and friend, the tear-er-downers of walls…

“I don’t know Vaness…” Your best friend is on the same path as your husband, the same leaving off of that last ‘a’… the conversation is changing… you’re not at the end of demo beginning of rebuild stage… HA… and you’re pretty sure that either subliminally or purposefully, they’re softening the blow with that lack of ‘a’.

“It’s all gotta come out, doesn’t it?”

“I mean…” they both trail off.

“Fuck.” And then, trying to salvage any part of this… “Ok but can you save any of the wood that is good? Maybe we can use some of this…?”

“Vaness…”

There it is again…

“There’s a lot of nails in all this framing, maybe even the most nails that i’ve ever seen in a frame out while working (nearly two decades) in the construction industry… then the mold…”

“Well… I’ll take the nails off and we’ll just cut off the gross parts…”

He’s not going to argue… he probably understands that you need a little ‘save’ in all of this… this little problem… the little problem that got real big, real fast… why kick somebody when they’re down…

“Where am I putting the wood,” he sighs.

“Right here,” you point… which is exactly where it would still be a week later when you admit that at this point the effort in rendering these boards useful again would be far better spent in any of the numerous projects in need of immediate attention on a daily and ever growing list… .

“A ‘little’ problem…” you mused back then, thinking of what you and your husband had mistakenly called ‘a little problem’ … you didn’t know this then… but you were growing privy to the idea that this ‘little mold’ issue was really going to gum up your plans… and that it would most definitely not be resolved within a month’s time. A month later and you all would have hauled a cumulative four tons of rotted, moldy wood, concrete, drywall, and insulation out to not one but two massive dumpsters (and that you were planning, five weeks later, to get a third and possibly fourth dumpster), and you all would have removed the damaged concrete and plaster from old stone walls with sledgehammers and pure determination (literal tons), you would have torn out the only other bathroom… a cute little half bath in the basement… (as the toilet was sinking into the wet, decaying floor a problem you still haven’t quite solved some almost six weeks in), you would have all massaged aching backs and necks and calves under steaming hot streams of water every night after a hard day’s work (thanks to the new hot water tank)… and you all long ago, would have realized that you’d be lucky if you had the basement live-able this year… even if no one was saying that part out loud.

“Ok…” he says… picking up several 2x4’s and dragging them to your designated ‘save zone.’

Your best friend follows you both in suit and soon there is a little pile of 2x4s: covered in various accumulations of mold coverage and what could best be described as a comically absurd smattering of old nails and screws.

A lesson… one of many you figure you’ll learn here: don’t sweat the small stuff, move on… fix the big stuff that you can… And you’re also pretty sure (you’re learning) that applies to more than just moldy piles of 2x4s.

Later that night before everyone began their exhausted last summit up the two to three flights of stairs (for god only knows how many times) needed to get to your respective beds; you all discussed the day’s work… and in summarization you all concluded that: this basement fix was a far bigger (and more costly) project than you all had anticipated… that it would most definitely not be finished within the month… that there was a good chance you were going to need to hire some muscle to help with replacing the rotted floor joists (surprise, you found several of those too)… and that you had a very long road ahead of you all…

After talking you all head upstairs; “you know you’ve got a ton of work to do… but it’s rewarding you tell yourself… it’s productive… so what if plans have changed a bit… ?” you think as you slide into bed… “This is all stuff that we can fix… just going to take a little longer… than we thought and that’s ok…”

You were quickly settling into a new found peace, the peace in knowing that all was good… all was well… that there was no problem that you couldn’t solve… that there was zero use in worrying… and that you had this all under control…

You’re not sure how many hours had passed, you felt as if you were in some sort of dream… one minute you were getting into bed, envisioning this new zen version of your former high strung worry wart of a self - slowly turning to - ‘every-little-ting’s-gonna-be-alright…’ self when you were roused out of dreamland by a high pitched scream and a flurry of movement followed by even more screams…

Six weeks later… the bats… the cats… the squirrels… the trees… (all the neighbors with their look and sees) even all those fucking bees… and you’re pretty sure that you can weather a whole lot of shit… calm, cool, and collected…

In that moment though… in bed… waking up to the screaming and the commotion and even more screaming… you weren’t thinking ‘zen’… your brain was trying to make sense of the screaming… “IT’S COMING AFTER MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” And the dark figure running past your room at break neck speed… with what appeared to be a bat a few seconds behind the figure, slowly trailing in their wake…

And at that point, you knew that there was at least one more problem to add to your list…

You just weren’t sure… like all the others, if this was a ‘little’ problem… or something a bit more entailed… for now though… there was a bat in your house, in the middle of the night, chasing someone through the home… and big or small… this little problem was currently taking priority.