Home Improvement

Remember that show?  Man, I loved that show when it was on.  And I was soooo in love with Jonathan Taylor Thomas*.  My friends and I used to go buy any TeenBeat/TigerBeat/whatever that had him on the cover, then buy some other magazine to hide it in because we were completely ashamed.  Hilarious.

This post is not about that.  But there are certainly some similarities.

Yet another less than entertaining post.  Bite me.  This is MY blog, and I will ramble inanely about the banalities of our life if I so choose.  And all my followers will leave me and I will cry.  Maybe I’ll have time to write a “real” post later today.  If the Earth’s rotation suddenly slows down and a few extra hours spring out of nowhere.

Remember when we bought our house? (Pictures).  And then when we spent all the time decorating it just perfect?  We painted the bedroom a beautiful, deep red, the master bath a dark slate gray with stone detailing on the countertops and trim – I WISH I had pictures of it, and MacGyver did the kitchen in an unbelievable Tuscan theme – warm textured yellow/gold walls and tile countertops.  And then remember when the Marines moved us 9 hours away from that house?

Well, we’ve been renting it out since then, which hasn’t been all that bad.  At the very least because of its location we haven’t had any trouble at all renting it out.  Actually, we have people competing (offering more rent, free repair services, etc) for it.  But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been any headaches.

MacGyver has had to drive up periodically to make repairs.  The last time he went up, he called me really pissed off.  The tenants apparently didn’t understand the difference between renting and owning nor did they seem to understand our very clear stipulations about which rooms they were and were not allowed to modify.  The wife painted our beautiful dark stone master bathroom light pastel blue.  Choke me.  She even painted the countertops!!!!  WTF?  Who paints countertops?  Who paints textured countertops?  They also took out our compost area.  Seriously?  We told them to put the bathroom back the way it was, or it would come out of the security deposit.

Then, in Nov, a pipe burst.  This kind of damage is covered by our homeowners insurance, so we didn’t think it would be much of an issue.  Wow, were we wrong.  To start, we had to fire the first contractor company because MacGyver caught them lying to us.  The next contractor had a psychiatric break and barricaded himself in his house holding his family hostage.  Yeah.  And those were just the beginning of the problems.  It was one thing after another after another after another.  It was unbelievable.  I won’t even try to give a timeline or cover all the effing craziness with this thing, but some of the highlights:

- An incompetent liaison at the insurance company who was SO hard to get a hold of and waited weeks before returning calls
-  The original contractor we had to fire did the water mitigation improperly which ruined the counters in the kitchen and caused a mold issue.
-  Due to mold and the heat going out (related to the water damage), we allowed the tenants to terminate the lease early and had to fight with the insurance  company to cover the rent even though it was clearly covered in our policy.
-  At least 10 different adjusters and other kinds of “experts” have had to be called in by us and the insurance company while we battled all the details out for getting all the water damage repaired as well as the damage the insurance company’s contractor caused.

And that’s just a sampling of it.  MacGyver has had to go up a couple times to deal with this crap, and it is getting old fast.  MacGyver has been AMAZING in dealing with it, though.  Seriously, all the phone time and paperwork required has been nuts and he has been spending SO MUCH TIME taking care of it.  I owe him something HUGE after all this (any suggestions?).

So, more than a week ago, MacGyver went up again to make a couple repairs unrelated to the damage before our new tenants move in.  And the final repair work from the burst pipe was just starting.  The pipe burst IN NOVEMBER!!!  The work was finished in APRIL.   FIVE MONTHS!  Frig.  But it’s done.  And we got to pick out beautiful new floors, countertops, carpet, etc.

So, MacGyver went to VA.  He was supposed to be there for 3 or 4 days.  He was supposed to come with me to Atlanta.  But things in my life so rarely go the way they’re supposed to, and those effects also spread to affect MacGyver.  So he got busy.  He did a billion things.  Seriously, he is the most productive person I know.  But he pushes himself too hard.  And he ended up in the emergency room because he passed out in a store.

Remember last April Fool’s Day?  You know, last time MacGyver was in the ER?  I am going to start chaining him to the bed at the end of March from now on.

Even better?  The butt didn’t even TELL me he was in the ER until two days later!  Needless to say, I can’t get him home soon enough and am going out of my mind with worry.  He was on his way home last night.  He texted me at 4 am to say that he had stopped to take a nap. 

I didn’t get the text because my phone was on silent, but, incidentally, Flintstone thought that would be a great time to wake up.  I was roused by little baby noises and something bumping insistently against my side.  I open my eyes to see a happy little chubby face smiling away, and up in crawling position – ready to party and move.  He’s been scooting and semi-crawling for a while now, but he’s just started really mastering it, and apparently 4am is a good time to practice.  And while I am a sleep whore, I can’t miss an opportunity to play with the little guy, so I was up and playing until he fell back asleep – 20 minutes before my alarm.  Cute.

Anyway, MacGyver should be home by now, but I haven’t heard from him.  I’m sure he fell right into bed.  I also can’t get a hold of my mother in law, who is still with us and has extended her stay by another week so she can lecture me on the evils of contraceptives and seatbelts and bitch about my cooking some more.  So that’s nice.

Anyway, I just wanted to get the house nonsense down now that it seems to be coming to a close.  Trust me, this is much better than if I had given you all a running commentary on this ridiculousness.

* I will now waste half my afternoon trying to determine where he is now and if he’s still hot . . . . . . Aaaaaannnd – apparently he is gay?  I can’t tell for sure.  Could just be internet rumors.  But I guess I wouldn’t be surprised.  After all, Lance Bass was by far my favorite member of *NSync, so it would fit with a trend for me ;-)  (Also, there are a bunch of idiots on the IMDB message board saying he couldn’t be gay because he’s a really solid guy, really smart, etc.  What the hell does any of that have to do with sexual orientation?  Jackasses.)