The Curse of Unfinished Renovation

Argh! I'm cursed. I'm serious. Every time I'm in the area when people try and do repairs they spontaneously discover something worse that they can't handle before they even start. Nothing gets done and everything gets worse. It's ridiculous, really.

So, my mother's hosting Christmas this year (Most of the clan will be there and, well, it's going to be a big party. It always is.) so she's been a whirlwind of cleaning and renovation since well before Thanksgiving. One of the things she's doing is getting brand new carpets. And, of course, they have to be installed before Christmas. The last week or so has been spent tearing out the old carpets and the tack boards. Moving out furniture. Carefully storing away any breakables. And everything else associated with preparing for people to come in and lay down the new carpet. Well, they also need someone to be in the house at the time they show up for obvious reasons and I volunteered for that. By, you know, being volunteered for it. Anyhow, the carpet people show up, take one look around, and go, "Got pets, huh?" And, yeah, my mother has a few pets - as do I and, really, most of my family. But well, tearing out the old carpet we found out that my mother's cat had been, well, pissing all over the room and it had stained the boards something fierce. Which is why my mother was getting new carpet - she'd been hoping to just get rid of the carpet (which is a good twenty, thirty years old at this point) and have some nice hardwood floors. A punch of cat urine soaking into them doesn't exactly make them look nice so she opted for getting new carpets instead. It didn't smell all too good either so we'd bleached and scrubbed and put baking soda and all the rest - it helped but hadn't completely removed the odor. But, well, long story short the carpeteers said that without priming the floor with a particular product first (Kilz - the oil based one because that's the one that works on odors, basically. On our floor anyway.) that in due time the smell would come back. And the stain would seep into the new carpet ruining it. Putting down the carpet was pointless. So they were done for the day and I rushed out to get the stuff and start on painting things so they could come back next week. So now I'm going to be washing and rinsing and hauling furniture back and forth just so I can paint the damn place and have it dried in time. Which, you know, if someone at the carpet store had mentioned that if we had any animal stains on the carpet this little product might be a good idea (It's, you know, paint so the cost is nothing compared to the carpet. But the time it's going to cost is the concern here.)

So, yeah, another day of light production. I'll see if I can't get some stuff done tonight but there's still one or two more things I want to get done that are giving me trouble. And I want to get those done before I start posting again in earnest. Of course, I have some stuff sitting in my ghost file that's getting pretty dated. Anyhow, I split the overly large document I was using to store this stuff into several parts last night so the word counts a bit fuzzy. But, I estimate I went from about 75k to a little over 80. Call it 6,000 words. Which is pretty good but not up to the pace I'm trying to set for myself. I'm even more behind today but hopefully I can crank out some words before I get too exhausted to continue - 2k an hour seems to be a good, relaxed pace for me.

Outlook: I'm feeling really lazy today. So of course I'm going to get right to work and take care of that.

[1] - 15 minutes