mary

Good morning, Y’all!

I think we’re finally gonna be able to take it easy for a few days.  The past few days have really been exciting…I’m being sarcastic, if you really want to know.

Thursday evening I was cooking dinner and Micheal was putting new locks on the doors.  You had to jiggle the key in the lock to unlock the front door and the back door wouldn’t lock at all.  Anyway, I was standing there at the stove and I could hear water running.  It was raining pretty hard so I thought maybe Micheal had left the front door open so I walked into the living room to see.  No, it was closed, but the sound was louder, so I headed down the hall and looked in the front bathroom.  The toilet was overflowing and the tub was full of nasty water.  I yelled for Micheal and he came running.  He stopped the toilet from running and I grabbed the cheap mop I’d just bought but it wasn’t doing any good at soaking up the water so I went to the other bathroom to grab the few towels we have here.  The shower stall in the other bath also had water standing in it and it was just beginning to run over into the floor.

I think I’d said before that this house has hardwood floors all through it except the kitchen and the bathrooms.  The kitchen has linoleum and the bathrooms are tiled.  We were busting our humps trying to keep the water from running out onto the hardwood floors.  Luckily there is about a half inch rise at the edge of the tile in the door way…a sort of lip that was keeping the water in the bathroom.

We finally got the water mopped out of the floors and Micheal started plunging the toilets and the shower drain.  There was so much sludge in the tub and shower that it just wasn’t funny.  We finally got the water down but the mess in the tub and shower was truly nasty.  While Micheal was working on the plunging, I called the landlady.  She wanted to put us in a hotel for the night but we just didn’t want to go.  We’re both tired of hotels.  We had it where the toilets were usable and that’s what mattered.

The landlady arranged to have the sanitation department come out and check things out, which they did.  They said everything on their end was fine and that we needed to have our landlady take care of it on her end.  He did say if it happened again to call them immediately, 24/7 and not to try to drain it so they could check it under those conditions.  But everything was running fine so we thought it was just one of those things, til Friday night.

Micheal had to work Friday night and I decided that would be a good time to wash all the towels we’d used mopping up from the night before (actually this was about 1:00 Saturday morning).  Just as soon as the washer started draining I could hear water bubbling in the front bathroom.  I ran to the washer and shut it off, then headed for the bathroom.  The tub was filling up again and water was coming out around the base of the toilet.  The shower in the other bath had water in it again, too.  So I immediately called the sanitation department.  They came out and checked things again.  They said the drain on the edge of the yard was bone dry so the pipes had to be blocked somewhere under the house or between the house and their line.  Great.

About 8:00 yesterday morning I called the landlady.  She sent a friend of theirs out with a snake to clear the lines.  Barry finally got here around 2:00.  After almost 2 hours, Micheal called her and said she needed to call a real plumber because Barry wasn’t making any progress and didn’t know what to do next.

Well, the plumber finally showed up about 7:00 last night after Micheal had gone back to the office.  After 2 hours the plumber finally had the lines completely clear.  He called the landlady and told her that there were roots growing through the lines in the yard and it all needed to be replaced.  He also told her what kind of mess I had in the tub and shower from the backups (there was about half an inch of sludge in the shower in about a 16 inch circle around the drain).

Now, here’s the good part.  The landlady called a professional cleaning service and they’re gonna be here tomorrow to give the entire house a thorough cleaning – top to bottom and end to end!  I was dreading having to tackle cleaning that mess and now I don’t have to.  I did have to clean the shower in the master bathroom so we could use it, but now I don’t have to worry about scrubbing the tub and floor in the front bath.  The cleaning service is gonna take care of all of that, and they’ll clean the mess on and in the cook stove that the previous tenant left that I’ve been working on!  Would you believe I was planning to call a cleaning service myself?  I knew it would hurt me too much to try to take care of it all myself and now I don’t have to, and I don’t even have to pay for it!

So we’ve had an exciting few days.  Micheal got home from work a couple of hours ago.  He’s sleeping right now but after he wakes up we’re gonna go shopping for some new furniture.  We’re gonna get a new bedroom suite instead of keeping the rental, and we’re gonna get a coffee table and end tables for the living room.  And we’re thinking about getting one of those movable kitchen islands with a butcher block top.

Tomorrow I’m gonna sit here and relax while the cleaning service does their thing.  That’s gonna be nice.  I’ve been on the run ever since we moved in and I’m ready to relax a little!

I’m gonna go read a few blogs.  Y’all have a great day!!!!