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Thursday, September 06, 2007

My Worst Day of Being a Homeowner

As usual these days, my kids were driving me nuts. Have I mentioned that I'm counting down the days until my older son (OS) starts preschool? Actually, to give them credit, they were much better today than yesterday. However, thinking about bad parenting days reminded me of the worst day I've had as a homeowner.

When our belongings arrived in our house, the movers told us that we didn't have a washer/dryer hook-up. I thought that was odd, particularly because the inspector hadn't mentioned it, but what did I know? I arranged for a plumber to come the next day. Day three of my first official ownership of a house came, and I was waiting for the plumber to arrive. In the meantime, I realized it had been unusually quiet in my house. Yes, this was before I had kids. However, I had my parents' two golden retrievers with me, one of whom was a 6 month old puppy. All of a sudden it dawned on me that the puppy was nowhere in sight. After doing a room by room search, I found out that he had snuck upstairs and was chomping away on a purple pen. When he saw me he pranced around in delight, leaving purple pawprints all over our new carpet. O.K. the carpet wasn't new, but it was new to us and in pretty good condition at least prior to said paw prints. I was busy applying OxyClean when the door bell rang. I quickly ushered the plumber inside and told him to head on down to the basement, since I was still cleaning up the pawprints.

About 15 seconds later, I heard him shout up and ask whether or not I was aware that there was a flood in the basement. What?! I had no idea what he was talking about. Unfortunately, the dogs heard him differently. They thought he called them, so they went flying down the stairs into the basement. I went down to the basement to investigate myself. It turned out that our cess pool had backed up into our basement. When the plumber removed part of the pipes to see the blockage, he found that it was caused by a ton of old, used tampons that had been flushed down the toilet. (For those of you who have sewer systems, you're never supposed to flush tampons down a septic system).

Since my period had not appeared in my first three days at the new home, it should be obvious that the tampons belonged to someone else's. Gross!

What was grosser than gross was that the dogs began playing in the disgusting water, which they proceeded to drip all over the first floor. I gave the dogs a bath and the plumber got rid of a lot of the water.

Finally, the carpet was clean, the dogs were clean and the floors had been mopped. The basement was not fully cleared yet, but it was much improved. Just as I was sitting down to enjoy a relaxing cup of tea, one of our cats jumped onto the exhaust fan/light over our stove and the whole thing came crashing down taking bits of the wall with it. At that point I lost it and burst into tears. Then I called my mom.

I realize compared to having a house fire or having a tornado go through my house (although some visitors to my house might argue that it looks as though a tornado has gone through it), these occurrences were minor. But at the same time, there were just so many of them at once!

A. Elliot's Lesson Learned: Don't throw personal hygiene products into the toilet, particularly if you have a cess pool.

Check out my new review on a Girlology Hang-Ups, Hook-Ups, and Holding-Out on Flexible Reviews. I use the word sex frequently.

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posted by Alex Elliot @ 8:27 PM   6 comments
6 Comments:

  • At 9/07/2007 8:52 AM, Blogger Suzanne said…

    Yeah, years' supplies of other people's used tampons would make me cry too.

     

  • At 9/07/2007 8:52 AM, Blogger Suzanne said…

    Also, at least the dogs didn't eat the tampons, right?

     

  • At 9/07/2007 11:11 AM, Blogger Heather said…

    Icky! Yep, I'd have had a nervous breakdown.

     

  • At 9/07/2007 12:56 PM, Blogger Worker Mommy said…

    Ok Alex I kinda had to laugh here. Just because several years ago just before we bought our home we called our landlord to fix a clogged toilet. The plumber (a friend of the landlord) came in fixed it quickly and then called someone on the phone and said "yeah its one of those".
    Of course I had to ask him what that meant. He then had to explain to me that the cloggage was from a tampon. And yes i had flushed it.
    I wanted to crawl in a hole at that point but just tried to laugh it off.

    I haven't done that since.

    Dogs can be rather vile sometimes. Mine has eaten poop. YUCK!!

     

  • At 9/07/2007 4:31 PM, Anonymous pinks & blues girls said…

    Oh that is gross. Gross, gross, gross all over!

    Jane, P&B Girls

     

  • At 9/14/2007 8:57 AM, Blogger Whirlwind said…

    There are times when homeownership just sucks!

     
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Name:Alex Elliot
Home:MA, United States
About Me:Professional Mom of two cats, a dog, an ant farm, and oh yeah...two boys: a 6 year old and a 3 year old. Also found in my house is my husband who is known on this blog as The Big Giraffe.
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