Darin and Jean: May 2008

Sorry it's been a while since I posted last....let's just say things around here have been a little interesting. On Thursday May 8th (the one day in about 3 weeks that I actually went to my office instead of working at home and the day before my 9th 30th birthday) the flapper valve on the toilet didn't close when I flushed it at 6:40 AM just before walking out the door to catch the ferry. I arrived home that evening between 5:30 & 5:45 and jauntily walked down to the mailbox to retrieve several birthday cards and even more jauntily walked back to the house to be greeted by my VERY happy dog. It was only when I opened the bathroom door that I discovered the Great FLOOD of 2008.... I did NOT do anything jauntily for several hours after that!

What, a little old flapper valve malfunction can cause a mess??? Oh yes it can, if you have a septic tank that eventually couldn't keep up with the flow. Once the tank filled, the water then had nowhere to go but down into the basement (yes it WAS a finished space). It was literally raining from the ceiling when I went downstairs to inspect the damage! Fortunately, so far our insurance has treated us very well and immediately called Service Master who promptly removed 150 gallons of water from the basement carpet. We had visits from them every two days for a week, adjusting fans, removing carpet, sections of ceiling and wall in the basement and the floor in the bathroom. We are officially "dry" now and get the lovely job of starting re-construction. One piece of good news is that we did find out just how healthy our drain field is - once the water was turned off it cleared out in under two hours!! YEAH!

I am in charge of project planning and procurement and Darin is the job foreman and generally AMAZING carpenter (I do SOOOOO adore my husband.) So, while the floor is out we are going to do a full remodel on the bathroom and will eventually get around to doing the same in the basement after a few yard projects get finished. What fun!

While we were waiting for the house to dry out, Darin finished up the garage project with paint and I of course have to share his handiwork. We also took out the ginormous pampas grass from beside the house and replaced it with a nice little fence and some concrete pavers to hide our garbage and recycle bins from passers by.

The colors on the garage is the paint scheme we will be using for the rest of the house in June - I am so excited to finally be getting rid of our electric blue trim!!

So - that's what has been keeping us a "little" busy around here for the last couple of weeks.

Here's the newly painted garage:

Here is the house with the pampass grass (painting in progress):

Here is the new (almost finished) fence/garbage can concealer:

And, last but certainly not least - the actual garbage can/hose area (the septic tank is under the gravel that used to be ugly weedy dirt but had to be removed to inspect the tank to make sure it was functioning properly after the aforementioned flood...hence the extreme motivation to replace as shown and not just put back the ugly dirt!)