A Day in the Life of Home Ownership

Something mystifying and wondrous happened to me today.  Its like may never occur again, so I need to record it for fear that I’m losing what’s left of my mind and somehow made it up.

But, I swear, I didn’t make it up.

We’ve had so much work done on Moogie’s Mansion the last couple of months that it’s hard to remember everything we’ve done.  We’re still living in chaos, though, because most of the Laura Ashley bathroom (everyone needs a full bath decorated in busy, dark mauve Laura Ashley-esque floral prints off the kitchen, dontcha know.  We never got around to re-doing that bathroom.) is currently located in the kitchen and dining room while new tile is laid to replace that hideous pink carpet.  “Currently located” includes the toilet, which currently peeks out from under the kitchen table.  I have managed to get the contents of the laundry room out of the bathroom and dining room back into the new, much more spacious laundry room, though.

Have I mentioned that we’ve taken in a tenant?  Moogie’s Mansion is zoned as a multiple family dwelling, there being 2 water and power meters, and several entrances from outside.  Pepper actually lived in the apartment upstairs before we bought the Mansion and before I moved down here full-time.  When the house went on the market, he had fallen in love with it and didn’t want to risk having bad new landlords, so we just bought the old girl.  He had one tenant, a work colleague, before I moved down, and we haven’t had one since, using the apartment as guest quarters instead.

Moving in a tenant meant packing up and moving a quarter of the house from one side to the other!  At least a quarter of the house is now culled and packed away, ready for the next move.  But what a nightmare!  And the remainder of upstairs looks kinda like a used furniture store, with stuff stacked and leaning up against other stuff.  We’re gonna have to get a storage unit.

Anyway, another improvement we made was to replace the master bathroom toilet.  It was probably medieval vintage.  Long story shorter, when our wonderful Kerry Luminais Emergency Plumbers installed the new one, they cut off the water to the upstairs, too, by mistake.  And after they turned it back on, the water pressure to the apartment kitchen slowed over a period of days to something that might be generously described as a trickle.  Pepper, Tenant’s dad (who is a work friend of Pepper and occasionally stays here with her overnight when work calls him to New Orleans — Tenant is a cute young female twenty-something), and I all agreed — using our best plumber’s intuition — that something was clogging the ancient pipe and that it would need to be replaced.

Thank goodness for Kerry Luminais Emergency Plumbers! 

The guys got here this afternoon, checked out the problem, cleaned out the filter on the kitchen sink faucet, and left a tool for Cute Young Tenant to use should the problem recur.  All in the space of about 5 minutes, water was flowing freely.

But, here’s the miraculous part.

As we were walking down the exterior steps, I remarked how painless that had been and asked what I owed him.

Are you ready for this?

He said, “Not a thing.  My pleasure. And I’m still looking for a girlfriend for Bouie.”
I nearly fainted (especially since the stove repair guy had nicked us for a hefty repair bill to fix the apartment stove earlier in the day.)

I mean, when’s the last time you heard of a plumber doing something like that?!?!

I’m really gonna miss Kerry Luminais Emergency Plumbers.

And, I promise I didn’t make this up.

Read more at The Best of Times in a Moogie’s World