Both my parents have to have surgery this month. For my Dad, it's a relatively minor outpatient thing, but my Mom is having her thyroid removed because they're afraid it may be cancerous. If it does turn out that it's cancerous, thyroid cancer is about the best kind of cancer you can get - but of course I'm still scared for my Mom. At the same time, my grandma who had a stroke about two years ago, has been told that parts of her brain are dying. The doctor has told her she has to move into some kind of assisted living facility ASAP.
On top of it, we have a small leak in the roof over the garage. It's been there a while actually and we have been bad homeowners and mostly just trying to ignore it. Last week's rains of course reminded us again that we're going to have to get it fixed, which is going to be expensive and no fun at all.
Diana was going to Vegas with her work friends over Labor Day weekend and I was kind of looking forward to the chance to have some alone time, try to put aside the stress from work, which has been especially bad lately, and all the other family and life stuff. Then our ceiling caved in.
Actually, I want to try to be positive, because everything could have been way worse. Diana called me as I was on my way home Friday night and told me the ceiling was falling. I had just come from Erin's neighborhood, where Thursday night's storm had knocked over trees and power poles and pretty much everything else, so my first concern was that we had storm and roof damage. That was not the case, thankfully. Instead, the air conditioner, which is in the attic, was leaking.
This is what the ceiling looked like Friday night:
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| From Ceiling |
There must have been a lot of water on the floor, but Diana had pretty much cleaned it up by the time I got home. I got up in the attic and figured out it wasn't storm or roof damage, but stupidly it didn't occur to me that we should turn the AC off until Saturday morning. By Saturday, it looked like this:
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| From Ceiling |
I also got to spend the night in the house Saturday and Sunday night with no air conditioning. That's just lovely in Phoenix, right? I spent most of the days away from the house because doing anything out was better than being there. When I came home Sunday, the whole thing had finally come down:
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| From Ceiling |
Fun, right?
When Diana came home on Monday we were able to pull down some of the insulation and I could figure out exactly what was leaking. We rigged some pans so that we could have the AC on without causing any more water damage. Yesterday we finally got the AC fixed so it's not leaking anymore. Don't know yet when the ceiling can get fixed.
The real bitch of it is that most of the attic AC unit is underlaid by a drip pan (ie, a pan that collects and drains any water that leaks out). Except, the drip pan wasn't as big as the unit! And where it dripped from was a part not underlaid by the drip pan! Someone was really thinking when they installed this system, right?
But, really, it all could have been worse. You can't tell but this part of the ceiling is in the hallway just outside the guest bedroom and the bathroom. The floor was tile so none of the floor was damaged, even the sofa table and the quilt we had right there managed not to get wet or damaged. It's hard to luck at this situation as lucky but, if this had to happen, we're lucky it happened where it did.
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