I've said all along, Mother Nature is a bitch...

Definitely one of the more, erm, exciting things to happen in a while. All week, rain was forecast every day, so the contractor's team didn't do any work Monday-Thursday. Of course, every day it was supposed to rain, it didn't, so they could have gotten a fair amount of work done - most important to our cause, they could have gotten the floors set on the addition. However, hindsight is 20/20, and we certainly don't blame them for what happened. Last night/Thursday night, it started pouring around, oh 10pm. Not just a hard rain, not JUST a downpour - this was an absolute torrential downpour that flooded the street within a few minutes. Low and behold, the roof started leaking in a few places, so we started putting pots and pans in a few select spot to minimize damage. But then the noise started - noise that was the tarp covering the addition being ripped off. Within minutes of that happening, we had water pouring through multiple holes around the house, and the ceilings of all of the front rooms started to buckle under the pressure of the water build-up.

Our contractor and his foreman came over as quickly as they could, and they and Christopher got up onto the addition to try to mitigate the damage as much as possible, and I stayed downstairs trying to monitor the buckets and mop as well as I could. By this point, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, but the damage had been done, and the ceilings started to give way. First came the closet ceiling in the guest room. Next was the laundry room ceiling. Finally came the living room ceiling. Complete and total disaster. I'll admit that, when the living room ceiling gave out, I fell apart and spend a good 20 minutes crying in the bedroom with Maya, but once I pulled myself together and realized there was nothing to be done but move forward, the next step was assessing the damage.

There are a few bright spots in all of this. They may not be glaringly obvious to the untrained eye, as the house looks like a war zone at the moment, but, in no particular order: 1) the electricity somehow miraculously did NOT go out last night. Trying to combat everything in the dark would have been way worse. The power grid or whatever we live in is very well known for losing power at the slightest indication of bad weather, so this truly was miraculous.

2) The laundry room ceiling was going to need to be ripped off at some point anyway; I guess we're just a little ahead of schedule on that one :)

3) In emptying the guest room closet, we came across a Fine Young Cannibals tape, along with an old, old bottle of men's hair balm. First, I'm pretty sure that tape of FYC (and oh yes, I remember them well, too - I just wasn't a groupie like Christopher was) is one of 3 in existence anymore, so we may very well end up billionaires as a result of that fine. Second, finding hair balm that was once in Christopher's possession is a bit like Indiana Jones' discovery of the Holy Grail in "The Raiders of the Lost Ark" - when was the grail/hair last seen? What do you do with it once evidence of its existence has been irrefutably proven?

4) Well, that's about all I've got, but our contractor and crew have been very helpful and responsive, and they're moving quickly today.

5) Oh, I didn't go into labor last night as a result of the stress. Sparky kicked the ever-loving shit out of me until well after 1am in his evident excitement, but no early labor. Always a win-win.

I'll keep posting pictures as they work on it over the weekend, but a few pictures to give an idea of what it looked like last night:

The laundry room this morning. You can see the gaping hole.

The relatively minimal damage in the kitchen - that ceiling won't need to be replaced, though there is still a lot of clean up to be done. *Sigh*

Laundry room at the start of it all. Just starting to leak.

Laundry room after the first collapse. It collapsed a bit further from there.

Living room collapse. That ceiling will need to be completely ripped out.

General laundry room disgustingness.