Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink!

So this week in the lives of the Kirkebabies means rain coming through 2 stories of your house, always at night and always when Daddy Kirkeby is working late! So Mama Kirkeby gets to deal with all of the mess herself.

Just after our last post on July 1, the rain started and as I was getting ready to head to bed, I hear and see water everywhere in the foyer of the house. We had Niagara Falls sprinkling on our steps and around our molding and in the paint. Thankfully it required mostly just me over-moping the floors with towels and then finding a place to hang these now wet towels once it stopped raining. Now any of you who know the foyer, know that it is on the first story of 2 stories. So you, ask, 'How does water make it through 2 stories?'

I asked myself the same thing, in an attempt to find where the water was coming from. Once I got upstairs to our *new* officespace (e.g. converted attic 18 months ago), I witness water coming in between the cracks of the draywall, pockets of water in the paint, drips coming through the hardwood floors and the lovely sound of what i thought was a hose between the walls of my house. So I totally freaked, attempting, like a cartoon holding a balloon with more leaks than fingers, to contain each of the many leaks and water entering my house and wondering 'when will the rain stop?'! So what seemed like an eternity was a storm that was less than a hour and damage that required these enormous fans plugged into our walls to attempt to remediate/alleviate the amount of moisture plaster attracts.

Good news: the upstairs dried itself out, so all we have are plaster, drywall and wood molding to replace, along with some new trim or fixed trim, depending on whether it dries itself out. Bad News, on top of not having a *real* kitchen, and living in our makeshift kitchen in the dining room, we now have the added pleasure of having them demo the plaster ceiling in the foyer of the house to get the wet plaster out. Why does this bother me? Because they are basically demo-ing wet, 60 year olf plaster with what is probably lead paint and I have 2 children under 4 and they eat about 20 feet from the demo.
Good news: they pay for just about everything inside the house to repair (less our, thank god we kept it low deductible).
Bad news: If it rains agian, it will come back in the house.
Bad news: I can't get a roofer to do this repair for at least a week and we are forecasted thunderstorms Thursday through the weekend.
Good news: They are making progress on the remodel while we live in what seems like eternal hell....

So what I had intended to post last week, I will post now. Here are the pictures of our progress from around July 6. . . .

View of the boys outside the family room-soon-to-be-bay window

View from the family room to the kitchen

View of the patio area (where they cut the soon-to-be-9' patio door and the 2 window- one old and one newly cut on the corner)

My contruction workers helping 'fix their house'

View from the driveway of the 2 new openings for the kitchen bay window and then the family room bay window-'seat.'