A Work at Home Mom’s Blog

I was a little premature with the whole getting back to normal thing. On Wednesday, our basement flooded once again. Not nearly as bad as the first time, and not bad enough to hurt anything, but bad enough to let us know that there was more work we needed to do.

Since it was raining, Hubby’s crew didn’t work, so he crawled under the house to inspect. A friend of ours didn’t work either, and he showed up to help. They ended up digging a trench from beside the patio to the existing trench to divert the water that was ponding up out there, and putting up new (actually used, but in good shape) guttering out back.

Meanwhile, we rented a pump to get the water out of the basement. I took it back, and lo and behold, it rained again that evening. We ended up with more water down there, but this time it came in from the front. It wasn’t much, and it would have drained out if the drain weren’t so clogged up. Hubbs managed to get it to drain, but it still keeps clogging and leaving water in the floor every time it rains a little.

Our main priority now is getting the drain fixed. Hubby says he can fix the problem out front, but it won’t be a quick fix. But if we can just get what goes in to drain, I think we’ll be okay until he can do it. We’ve been asking around trying to borrow a drain snake and had no luck, but I think my mom is going to send us the money to rent one.

At least the past couple of days have been better than most this month. I’m just so ready to quit worrying constantly and making trips to the hardware store and looking at faucets online and getting ready to hit the order button, only to find out that’s not the problem. I’m happy to be a homeowner, and I wouldn’t go back to renting for the world, but sometimes it’s full of headaches.

For nearly three weeks, we’ve been having water trouble. It all started with a bad pressure switch, which we thought was no big deal. Then we got a cold water leak, which it took Hubby forever to get fixed. Then we found out that the water heater wasn’t working. And that ceased to matter much when we got a leak in the hot water going into the tub.

In between it all, the basement flooded, which kind of changed our priorities. We finally got that mess cleaned up and Hubby dug out the trench around the house so that it hopefully won’t happen again. Then he dragged his feet on the water until yesterday.

He put new fittings on the hot water pipe to the tub, then set about trying to put elements in the water heater. But as it turned out, we ended up needing a whole new unit. After being dollared to death with plumbing supplies and eating out due to lack of water, and Hubby getting far fewer hours than usual at work due to rain, that’s the last thing we needed to happen.

It appears that all the plumbing problems are fixed now, but the bank account is severely broken. Not having to pay our car insurance this month may help a little, but it’s not going to compensate for much. Hubby and I are both attempting to pick up some extra work to make up the difference.

I just hope that everything gets back to normal now. Hubby and I have both been near the breaking point for several days, and we don’t need anything else messing up to stress us out even worse.

It has been raining a lot here lately. A whole lot. I could probably count the number of days this month that it hasn’t rained on one hand. I guess the April showers showed up a month late this year.

I was in a tizzy because I couldn’t dry clothes without either taking them to the laundromat or someone else’s house, since Hubby still has yet to install a dryer outlet and hanging clothes out in the rain does no good. That wasn’t such a big deal after our water started giving us trouble. Not to be outdone, the rain had to find some other way to get to me. So on Friday, we got another massive storm, and we ended up with knee-deep water in the basement.

I was at home when it happened, but I was completely clueless. I had a terrible headache, so I lay down and dozed off and on for a couple of hours. Pumpkin was here too, but the thunder and lightning were scaring her so she lay down with me and was out in no time. I was none the wiser until the storm had been over for an hour or so, and Hubby came home and alerted me to the problem. He wouldn’t have known either, except that the water was so high it covered the steps that go under the porch and to the basement.

He called our insurance agent, but it would have done him just as much good to call a Pleasanton motorcycle accident attorney. Since we don’t have flood insurance, it doesn’t look like they’re going to cover anything. At least the agent took pity on us and brought over a pump to clear out the water. If it hadn’t been for that, we would probably still be dipping it out with buckets.

The standing water is gone, but there’s still a good bit of mud down there. The water/mud nearly pushed out one of the blocks in the wall, but it appears to be reparable. The pressure tank and washing machine are still operational, I can’t try out the dryer, and the water heater was already having problems before the flooding. We didn’t have much of anything else down there, and the few items that were there were mostly junk and not things that water would hurt. So I guess in a way, we were lucky.

Hubby dug out the trench that the previous owners had made to divert the water coming down off the hill around the house. We got plenty more rain over the weekend, and it appears to be working well. Now we just need to finish drying things out, check out the crawl space behind the basement and see what else we can do to prevent this from happening again and fix the basement wall. Not small tasks, but doable.

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Last week I mentioned that I was having water problems. I think that was on Thursday. Well, here it is Wednesday of this week, and I’m still having water problems.

It all started out with the water just not running. I thought maybe it was air in the line, but come to find out the pump wasn’t running. That freaked me out, because we can’t afford to buy a new pump. Luckily, it turned out that the pressure switch was bad. Twenty bucks and some help from a friend, and we once again had water.

Saturday morning, Hubby got up to find that the floor outside the bathroom was wet. When he finally got the paneling moved to take a look, he found a hole in the pipe going to the cold water in the tub. So we had to turn the water off.

He removed the pipe and took it to the hardware store. When we got there, we were greeted by a friendly clerk who had no idea what he was doing. It took him a good hour to figure out what Hubby needed! When we finally got out of there, we rushed home to get it fixed.

Hubby got the pipe and fittings on, but when he turned the water back on it was leaking at the joint in the basement. He kept putting glue on it, which I kept telling him he shouldn’t have to do, but what do I know about plumbing? And then I looked at the glue container, and it said that we should leave the water off for 24 hours if possible. Great.

So we did, and we tried it again on Sunday. Same thing. Hubby finally decided to take the innards out of the fitting and try putting them in the other way, because the guy at the hardware store had dropped it and put them back in. Apparently he put them in backward, because it worked.

Then he came back upstairs to check things out at the faucet. It was leaking where it hooked up. So then he started gluing that. I kept telling him that there must be something wrong with the faucet itself, but he just kept gluing and gluing. Once again we let it set, not for a whole day, but for several hours. Same problem when we turned the water back on.

To make a long story short, it took him until yesterday to get the faucet apart and find that there was a bad gasket in it. I was supposed to go get one today, but I can’t find the old one that I need to take with me so that I’ll be sure to get the right thing. I’ll have to wait until I either get ahold of him on his cell phone or he gets home to find out where it is. Then maybe, just maybe, we can get that taken care of.

I’m just so tired of all this. I’ve still got a ton of dishes in the kitchen, I can’t do any real cooking or food preparation (so we’ve had to eat out a lot, which isn’t cheap), and we’ve had to go to other people’s houses to take showers. And we’ve had two sunny days in a row, and I can’t wash clothes and hang them out. It’s amazing how badly not having water can stress you out. If it’s not fixed this evening, I’m going to figure out some way to afford a plumber.

What are all you moms out there hoping for? Some pretty flowers? Jewelry? Sexy corsets?

I’m just hoping for a nice, stress-free day. I won’t be going up to see my mom from the looks of things, I’ll probably just chill out at home. I could care less if I get anything or not.

Well, actually, there is one thing I’d like to have. Amazon has the Flip Ultra Camcorder on sale for $59.99. I would have ordered it for myself with some gift certificates I had, but I had already ordered some other stuff before I found out about the sale. But maybe I can talk Hubby into kicking in the difference between my GC balance and the full price. It’s worth a shot.

Anyway, I hope all you moms out there have a great Mother’s Day. And if you are concerned about anyone important forgetting about it, feel free to leave this post up on your computer screen for them to find.

It has been another one of those weeks around here. Just one thing after another. I’ve gotten very little done, so now everything’s all piled up and it’s driving me nuts.

First there was the whole Mom-in-the-hospital thing. I went to see her on Sunday, but didn’t really have anything planned for that day. But her procedure was on Monday, and I spent most of the day worrying about that until they called and let me know all was well and that she would be going home on Tuesday. I felt better, and thought maybe things would get back to normal. If only.

Tuesday Hubby came home from work to go to the doctor. He slept until it was time to go, so I did get a little done that morning. But once he went in, it was all over but the crying. Turns out he had MRSA, and as you probably know, that’s some pretty serious stuff. I wasn’t too worried myself, because he’s been keeping the boils clean and covered at all times and the doctor seemed confident that the two rounds of antibiotics and ointment she put him on would take care of it. But he absolutely freaked out. I spent the rest of the day and that evening listening to him mull over every aspect of it, wondering where he got it (from work we think), obsessing over possibly giving it to Pumpkin and I (no signs so far), and on and on and on. Not to mention all the soaking and cleaning and application of ointment and bandaging, and the segregation of the laundry, spraying of Lysol and all that fun stuff.

The doctor said it was fine to go to work on Wednesday, as long as he kept everything clean and covered. But Pumpkin was sick that day, so I didn’t get much done then either. I took her to the doctor because she was complaining with her stomach and throat, and my first thought was strep. She tested her for it, and it came up negative, so she did a test for a different type of it that had to be sent off. But she said she was really just being cautious since she had a history of it, and she thought it was just a mild virus. I think she was right, because she’s doing fine today.

Today I got up thinking maybe, just maybe I would get something done. I have writing work to do, but there’s also a ton of housework piled up thanks to all of these disruptions. Dishes, messy living room, disinfection of everything and all that good stuff. Unfortunately, I can’t do most of it. Why? Because the water decided to quit running this morning. I’m pretty sure that there is air in the line, because we’ve been having pressure problems for a week or so. But I don’t know how to fix it. Hubby said he would take care of it when he got home, but that doesn’t help me right now. I can’t wash a dish, or clean the bathroom, or even take a shower. Arghh!

I also haven’t been able to do much laundry this week. It has rained almost incessantly, so I can’t hang anything out and still don’t have my dryer hooked up. I washed two loads and took them to the laundrymat after I took Pumpkin to the doctor yesterday, so hopefully that will get us through for a few days.It’s not raining right now, but they’re calling for it later on, and besides that the basement is very wet and muddy thanks to the leakage that Hubby hasn’t gotten around to fixing yet. So I’m not particularly inclined to trek down there to wash a load of clothes that may or may not get dry.

Edited on 5/8 to add: I just realized how dumb that last paragraph was. Actually I thought about it late last night, and had to come back and look to make sure I wrote something that stupid. You can’t wash clothes with no water! Not gonna delete it though, I’ll leave it up for everyone’s amusement.

I’m determined to get something done today. I’m not sure how far that determination will get me, because I’ve got so much on my mind, but hopefully I’ll get at least a little mileage out of it.

I have a hard time getting everything done that I want to get done each day. Between my scatterbrainedness and lack of energy, I’m lucky if I even get the paying work I need to do completed, much less any housework. I keep finding myself getting distracted by all the Web has to offer, looking at home improvement ideas or browsing a Charlotte events calendar to see if anything exciting is happening that I might be interested in. And I can never seem to remember to make a to-do list.

Today was the exception. I got up ready to get some stuff done, and after I put Pumpkin on the bus and ate breakfast, I made my list. I included even the most mundane stuff, such as removing my fingernail polish. I was so pleased with myself.

Unfortunately, removing my nail polish was the only thing I got done before I heard someone at the door. It was Hubby. He has two mysterious, um, things on him, one on his arm and the other on his side. They looked like boils to us, and we’ve been putting ointment and band-aids on them and trying to squeeze out the gunk for several days now. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but he got the one on his arm all cleared out this morning. The one on his side is still pretty bad, but it appears to be ready to drain any time.

Anyway, he got to work this morning, and his supervisor and coworkers said it could be something else and talked him into going to the doctor. But our doctor doesn’t come in until 1:00 (which he forgot), so he’s going to be hanging out here until then. So much for getting anything on my list done. He’s laying down now, but when he gets up he won’t let me concentrate unless he finds something to do himself. And then I’ll have to go to the doc with him to get some paperwork taken care of so we can hopefully get a discount.

I might as well just go back to perusing upcoming Charlotte events. It doesn’t look like today is going to be a very productive day anyway.

I got good news from the Mom yesterday. My sister called and told me that she had just gotten back from her catheterization, and it went well. They cleared one blockage and said everything else could be resolved with medication. And then she asked me if I wanted to talk to Mom.

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather! I had no idea that she would be coherent enough to talk on the phone after that. But she was awake during the whole thing, and even got to watch it on a monitor. Ain’t modern medical technology grand?

More good news: She is supposed to be coming home today. I was so glad to hear that. From what I saw during my brief visit they were taking good care of her at the hospital, but there’s truly no place like home.

I’m glad that’s all over with. I don’t know if she’s on any restrictions or anything, but at least she will be at home where she can rest well and be with her beloved dog. And I can rest easy not having to worry about her having to have a bypass.

I got a message from my sister yesterday morning. Actually she left it on the machine Saturday night, but I didn’t retrieve it until then. I called to see what she wanted, and she informed me that our mom was in the hospital.

She quickly told me not to worry. Apparently Mom had been having pains in her shoulder, and my brother convinced her to go to the emergency room. They ran some tests and then sent her on to another hospital for admission. She had a heart attack when Pumpkin was a baby, so they either found something of possible concern or wanted to be cautious.

I went to see her yesterday. She looks good and was in good spirits. They’re doing a catheterization today to check out her arteries and break up clots if necessary, and will find out if any further action needs to be taken.

I hope all goes well and she gets to go home soon. The prognosis is good, but she’s my mom and I worry about her.