christmas, part 4: the messes

Our Christmas season cannot draw to a close until I share with you the absolute and awful stresses of this December.

I.

Just off the cuffs of resolving (ha!) my traffic ticket, I got into an accident. Yes. I ran over an apartment complex driveway median, and by median I mean a good-sized planter with huge sharp jagged rocks instead of plants. I'm stuck on this thing. I didn't see it at all. My car is rocking back and forth for awhile. Wesley is crying. My heart is racing.

I decide to drive over it, and rev the engine, but have no luck. I decide to back up off of it, and by the graces of heaven I am free with all four wheels back on the ground. Although the undercarriage of my car has been completely mangled.

I go to the complex office and frantically try to confess my sin, seeing as how I obliterated the planter (rocks in the road, concrete curb broken up and spread out), but it was lunch time and no one was there. So I did what any self-respecting just-been-in-an-accident person would do: I went home.

As I turned left into my parking space I heard a sad noise and realized I probably had a problem. I had the audacity to think all I needed to do is get the Subaru dealer to check it out so they could tell me everything was fine. I seriously thought for less than $100 this could all go away. And I wouldn't have to tell my husband!

What is wrong with me? Sigh.

I had the good sense to call Shane, who recommended I call the insurance company since towing is free. And after several calls, wherein I realized the dealership probably wasn't going to tell me anything I wanted to hear, I just had it towed to the body shop that has helped us before when people have run into us and crumpled our car (not once, but twice). This time around, it was my fault.

The next day I got the call that the damage was extensive. We'd definitely file an insurance claim. I'd pay the deductible and get my car back as good as new.

Eight days later, that all came true. In fact, they replaced the entire front bumper (which had several knicks in it from over the years, as well as breaks from the the jagged-rock incident), so my car does look brand spanking new. Not a single scratch anywhere.

Sadly I was without a car in the final days of Christmas shopping (I did a lot online). I had to suffer the wrath of Shane, who was rightfully disappointed in my driving skills. I had to live with myself for what was yet another vehicular "mistake." You start to wonder after so many mistakes what are really mistakes and what is just carelessness. It hurts to do internal soul searching of that kind.

Interestingly, I was also rather concerned about the damage at the apartment complex, but my insurance people said they would call and take care of it as part of the claim process. I heard the results of their conversation: the complex wasn't really worried about it. In fact, I went back to the scene of the crime the next day and they had put that median back together. With the exception of tire tracks in the dirt and blue paint on the rocks, it looked like nothing had happened. Insane. My car had thousands of dollars of damage done to it, but that median just looked a little worse for the wear.

Me: 0. Median Planter: 1.

As a post-script to our story, I will have you know I was driving to Bellevue trying to make a temple session the other day, and if I missed it I would have to wait another hour for the next one to begin. And I missed it -- because I didn't drive like a crazy fool. I missed it by 3 minutes. Perhaps if I had done a bit of speeding and weaving I would have made it and shaved just 3 minutes or more off of my travel time, but it wasn't worth it to me. I ran some errands in the spare hour. It made me feel like maybe I am making some positive changes and being safer.

II.

There has been quite a bit of rain this year. The day after I got my car back, December 23, it was raining buckets. Some of you may know we had an issue over the summer with a water leak in our roof. A very small drip which made a stain in Wesley's room and freaked us out some. Some roof guys found the issue; a general handyman came and fixed the water spot; and all was well.

Until December 23.

I got Wesley up from his nap at 3 PM and this is what I saw:

The walls were sweating. The ceiling was peeling. Water stains were running down the wall. (You can see the spot where the previous water leak was repaired over on the left.)

Whoa. I called our property manager in HYSTERICS and told him something had to be done RIGHT NOW (the day before Christmas Eve).

A few hours later it looked like this:

The walls were bubbling. The door frame on the closet was bloated with water.

I called again. We were waiting for both a roofing guy (gotta stop the water) and a "restoration" guy (gotta get the water out of our place).

This is the worst it got:

Water stains seeped down to the carpet. Finally it stopped raining outside and the walls stopped sweating.

The roof guy came. He looked up on the roof -- no shingles were blown. He wasn't sure what it could be. He went into our crawl space above our unit. There were at least five, maybe up to eleven leaks above our unit. Small teeny leaks from where nails went through the wood improperly during construction. Ten years ago, a shoddy construction job lead to this today.

They put a tarp down to temporarily stop the water leakage. They need a good dry day to actually fix the problem. Hello! We live in Seattle! The only dry day last week was Christmas. Now it's snowing.

The restoration guys came. There was lots of moisture. They put a huge fan and a dehumidifier in the room. The machines made the room very very dry and very very hot (think 90 degrees. We didn't use heaters in our unit all weekend). The machines ran until Monday night. The dehumidifier had a hose that went across the hall into our bathroom sink, and every so often water would drain.

The guys checked in the crawlspace. Lots of insulation was wet and needed to be removed.

It gets worse. They were messing with our wall and they took off that water-swollen door frame. And found mold underneath. The protocol with mold is that now that entire wall needs to come down, so the inside can be completely cleaned out to make sure there isn't an more mold. It goes without saying that Wesley's stuff was all taken out of the room so he wouldn't be sleeping there.

The wall-removal hasn't happened yet, since they are still waiting for the OK from the roof guy that the issue is stopped (who knows?) and the OK from our property management guy. Although the "Association" is paying for this, indirectly we are paying for it, since we're homeowners. This is just awful.

And my question is: why us? why now? why here? why not everyone else?? It can't be just our third-floor unit. That makes no sense. This has to be happening elsewhere. The shoddy nail construction issues absolutely must be addressed right now so this doesn't happen in every single other top-floor unit. It makes me sick to my stomach.

Sooooo if you're wondering how we are, Wesley is in his crib in our walk-in closet. All the stuff in his room has been removed (including his dresser, changing table, futon, etc.), so the other 2-3 rooms of our condo are packed to the brims. It's like we live in a one-bedroom unit, and we are crammed.

I am desperate to get this taken care of. It is a huge mess.

What a Christmas! Stresses all around. I am grateful we have each other, and things have been peaceful during all of this. Things like this can really make a family crazy, but for some reason we've been adapting well. It's a blessing from heaven, I tell you.

OK, my sob story is complete. Please let December 2010 be over.