Ladies and Gents, welcome to 2009

This is a storytelling post.  Unfortunately, unlike the other storytelling posts, this story has no end.  Yet.

Laundry might be the bane of my existence.  It is never, ever, ever done.  If things are running along swimmingly (which, um, when, exactly does that happen?) I would start a load of laundry in the morning, allowing it to run mostly while I'm at work, because it is loud, and obnoxious.  That load would be tossed in the dryer when I got home, and folded before I went to bed.  Then, there would not be what the Fly Lady calls  "Mt Wash-More."

Instead, what actually happens is I manage to wash about 3 loads a week, and the clean clothes get tossed on the couch in the living room, and I fold them on Saturdays, catching up with whatever is left over then, too.

One weeknight last week, I came home and took off my coat, hat, scarf.  Have I mentioned lately that it is bloody freezing?  Anyway, I turned away from the closet, and I noticed that a sock had fallen off of the couch.  It makes the house look even messier than really is, and bothers my OCD-urge to have everything put in its place, even when its current place is not where it really  belongs.  So I walked over and picked up the sock, and that, my friends, is where the true trouble began.  Because that innocent black sock was soaking wet.  Not damp from the dryer being out of order, but soaking wet, dripping wet.   From the ceiling above, a drip, drip, drip from a crack we had repaired before we moved into this house.   Dammit.  There went my planned evening of a few glasses of sangria, dinner at a nearby Mexican place, folding the laundry, and going to bed.

Following the trail of water across the ceiling led us upstairs to our bedroom, which is the largest room in the house.  The wall in question had a desk up against it, and we pulled that back to discover a patch of damp drywall, damp enough to push our hands through to the insulation behind.

DH, once upon a time, was a firefighter and had to pull walls down searching for any errant flames, so he attacked the wall and pulled out insulation that was dripping wet, just like my sock.  Bugger.

We pulled off about a 3 square foot area of  that drywall, and discovered a hell of a mess.  Behind the soaking wet insulation was not a pretty picture.  I know almost nothing about construction, so my terminology may be inaccurate, but sometimes that's the way it goes.  The studs that frame the house are covered with a composite material, which looks like particle board.  I know, I know, it is not particle board,  rather, it is an insulating material that is between the pink fiberglass insulation INSIDE the house and the aluminum siding, OUTSIDE the house.  The wall joins up with my neighbor's section of our duplex and creates a 90 degree angle very close to where we ripped all that wet drywall off.  With a flashlight, we took a peek at that angle, and discovered a wall of ice between the aluminum siding and the particle board stuff.  You can reach into it, run your hand up and down that ice wall.  

What I don't know about construction could fill a library full of novels, but I do know that ice shouldn't really be *behind* the aluminum siding.  We had a contractor come the next day, someone we have worked with in the past, so we trust him.  

I have no idea what he did to fix it.

The ice, however, remains a problem, because it is still there.  Whatever contractor J did, it was to keep more water from coming into the house.  The ice that is already there has to go out the same way it came it; via the path of least resistance, and as liquid.  Which means that we will be cleaning up water for quite some time to come. 

Sigh.  

In the meantime, two rooms of my house are torn up, furniture shoved away from its usual spots, and, while not quite the hassle and expense that the leak has caused, something that adds little bit of fuel to this already messy fire.....

My laundry still isn't done.