It's all in the timing . . .

 

Our home repair and renovation, made necessary by a flood in November, has entered its final phase with the installation of our new kitchen and dining area flooring.  The installers finished work yesterday evening, and appear to have done a good job.  I'll be touching up some paintwork and erecting some replacement shelf units, then my wife and I begin the long, slow job of unboxing everything we packed away (including our "deep pantry") and shelving it again.  It's going to take a while.

It'll take longer because the last stage of the project - installing new baseboards to replace those damaged by water and the removal of old flooring - was scheduled for just after the cold snap that hit us last weekend.  With temperatures below freezing for several days on end, a lot of water pipes iced up;  and only yesterday, when the thermometer rose to above freezing for the first time in a while, did some of that damage make itself felt.  ServiceMaster, which is handling our wall repairs, promptly got flooded (you should pardon the expression) with calls for emergency clean-up, dry-out and other assistance.  The foreman who's handling our job among his many other tasks was immediately swamped with new, unexpected demands on his time and his teams.  He had to postpone measuring for and ordering our new baseboards, and says it may take several days to get things back on track.  We can't complain - this is Mother Nature's fault, not his - but it's going to be frustrating having yet another delay on top of all the others.

(I suppose we don't have all that much reason to complain, really.  The flood happened in early November, and in just over two months we've dried out the house, ripped out all the flood-damaged drywall and flooring, prepared the various surfaces for repairs, fixed the drywall, painted two walls, and installed new flooring.  In today's housing and repair market, that's doing rather well, I'm told.  It'll take another one to two weeks to obtain and install the baseboards, and I have to buy some new bookcases - some of our old chipboard shelving units didn't take kindly to the damp - but apart from that, we're in pretty good shape.  It could have been much worse.)

Today I've got to get hold of some good, thick cover-up white paint to touch up the inside of our pantry closets;  build a new set of metal shelves to go inside one of them;  throw out some of the old, damaged baseboards that were removed during the repairs;  and try to organize bookshelves from Ikea, which is not very helpful about rapid pick-up on its Web site.  (Why do they want four days to have items ready for pickup, when they show them as being in stock already?  WTF???)  There's no rest for the wicked, they say, and my life at present appears to bear that out!

Peter