A photo essay

The title of this essay is: 

 "Nah, we didn't really want that tax refund."

 There was an ear in the shower.

Behind the ear, there was water.

Because of the water, there was mold.

Because of the mold, there was stank.

$4000 later there is no ear, no mold and no stank.  And no tax refund.

I give up

90 degrees outside.  A/C not working, again.  We have a brand new air handler and compressor (thanks to the old one getting struck by lightening). WTF!!!!

My neighbors sister has a saying and I think I might start selling it on t-shirts and bumper stickers:

"Homeownership.  It's the American freakin' nightmare."  

Yes, she is from Jersey.

Just the tip of the earberg

We got trouble.  Right here in River City.  The tile guy came to do an estimate for fixing the shower.  He popped off a corner tile for me to use for matching purposes and found this:

This is not good.  This is wallboard, a.k.a. sheet rock.  You're not supposed to put this in a shower.  Sheet rock in a shower = Sponge.  Sponge = Water.  Water = Mold.  Mold = Fuck.

The stuff was literally crumbling away under the tiles.  I am livid.  I want to find the address of the woman who flipped this house, leave a flaming bag of poo on the porch, ring the doorbell and then stand back and watch.  I'm not even going to run.  She's going to scream obscenities at me and threaten to call the police and I'm going to stand there like a statue and just repeat our address over and over.  I think she'll get the message quickly.

Do you ever have those times where you feel like everything is falling apart all at once?  We have thousands of dollars of repairs that need to be done on our house, the house that we bought at the peak of the market, the house that is still losing value, the house where the property taxes are inexplicably still rising at a rate well above inflation, the house that luckily, thankfully we have built a happy life in.  This is seriously cutting into my 40th birthday year budget.  Not cool.

Dear Ty Pennington:  I need a not-so-extreme home makeover.  A home eye lift if you will.  Pretty please?

This old (motherfucking) house

I had so much good stuff to tell you all.  And then my boiler broke on the coldest day of the year.  Let me also add that our air conditioning broke on the hottest day of the year this past summer (I swear I do not make this stuff up).  The "emergency" plumber is overbooked for the night.  Oxymoron anyone?

So now the husband is at Target buying another space heater that will cause me to lay awake all night sniffing the air for signs of smoke.

These types of things have happened so many times in the past 4 years since we moved here we have a name for it.  We call it being "Jerseyied."  Good times.

Cow butt basement

It's been an awesome night.  I don't even know where to start.  A little back story first.  Our basement smells like farts.  It has smelled like farts for quite some time now.  I remember posting on a town chat board asking the question "why does my basement smell like farts" over a year ago.  There were many possible explanations that seemed logical enough for me to continue to procrastinate around getting to the bottom of it (hee hee).  If you're a "responsible" home owner I'm sure you're asking yourself "how could they let that go on for so long?"  Because that's how we roll.

Fast forward to tonight after dinner.  Out of nowhere the kitchen sink stops draining.  Illogical step 1:  Get the plunger.  I plunge.  Husband plunges.  Bubbles, gunk no drainage.  Step 2: I take everything out from under the sink, get a bucket and start to dismantle the plumbing.  No clog found there.  Step 3: Call neighbors and borrow "snake".  No luck with "snake".  Step 4:  Call father and ask for advice.  Father informs about thing called "clean outs".  Here's where our story REALLY begins.

So my dad tells me about these clean out valves.  I follow the pipe from the kitchen sink to the basement and figure out where it goes.  I start to unscrew this valve and it immediately starts spraying the foulest, cow ass smelling water ever.  A normal human would just walk away at this point and leave it to the professionals.  I am not a normal human.  I have an illness.  It must be related to the face picking but it's about not leaving well enough alone.

So I get a recycling bin and a bucket and go to town.  I swear the methane coming out of this pipe could have powered a smallish South American nation for at least a week.  There is a FOUNTAIN of butt water spraying all over me, all over the basement.  I finally get enough pressure released that I can get my snake in the pipe (hee hee) and start cranking.  All this does is slosh more foulness everywhere and give me a giant blister on my thumb.  

So you may also be asking yourself, "don't you have a husband?"  "Where was he this whole time?"  I do have a husband.  And he possesses something that I don't have.  Common sense.  He stuck his head down in the basement just in time to stop me from shopvacking the water out of the pipe.  It was at this point I knew I needed to step away and let the professionals handle this.

I have now showered and scrubbed the top layer of my skin off with some Tone Sugar Glow.  We'll wait and see what food borne illness has seeped into the hundreds of small scrapes and cuts in my hands.  

The sick part is I'm actually happy to know why my basement has smelled like a cow's butt for so long.  I always did like Nancy Drew.