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.'

D-Day is upon us. . .

I am incredibly relaxed considering that in 24 hours, we will no longer have a kitchen, or access to a kitchen, and it will be a minimum of four months until we do. Did I mention that with losing the kitchen, I am also losing our immediate access to laundry as well? Yet I admit, I am excited. Ask me again in month, but right now I am excited.

I keep telling Papa Kirkeby that all of our stress, which is mainly focused over the past month, will [relatively] go away once we are just OUT of the kitchen, rather than living our current dual life, trying to pack up every single thing that is in our storage, garage, kitchen, laundry room, etc. and determine what to keep and what not to keep (always a pleasant conversation in our house), and we just have to live through what sh*t we are in. I have convinced myself that once I am relegated to having to only use a bathroom as our only source of cleaning(unfortunately the same bathroom we use for a newly potty-trained three-and-a-half-year old) and cooking on our old dining room table, that the stress level will be less than the 'what to do with what' conversations and constant, every day moving, cleaning and decisionmaking.

Not to mention the animals underfoot: the cat and two dogs that are confused at why their litter box, bed and/or food sources have been moved to areas they are not sure will accomodate. Dude the cat keeps going back to her old bathroom and whining for her old life; and even after I carry her to her new food location and litter box, she runs out, back to the nasty half-bath and sits behind the toilet, crying. I am curious what she will do once there is no nasty half-bath to run to, no more toilet to hide under, from her arch nemisises, Gracie and Ollie. While poor Miss Dude has been with us for a mere three months now, besides the constant food source and attention from no less than 4 human beings that are pluses, she has had to be resilient with the constant pressure of being a presumptive dinner for two, 90 pound creatures. Who, by the way, have not yet determined (1) how to eat her or (2) who gets to try first. And now we are moving her to a new location! She will surely run away come Friday.

However, the 'Kirkebabies' apparently love the complete chaos we currently exist in. Jack enjoys being able to investigate every single cabinet that he has been told 'no touch' for his entire toddler existence and Henry likes watching for 'worker men' here to 'make him a new house.' He explained today that they can 'cut up' the kitchen and the storage room, but they have to leave 'Babee's sleeping room' and his playroom alone.

Our poor, new nanny has walked into the current Kirkebaby chaos, probably thinking it is mainly because of the imminent remodel. . .so I will try to keep her in the dark until after the remodel, when she sees that the chaos is a normal state of equilibrium in our household and she has little choice but to embrace it.