Bad things come in twos."
~Danny Elfman
They most certainly do. Did you think my moving catastrophe had ended with two wet cats, two icy dogs, and a waterbed full of cold water? Ohh no. It got worse.
The morning after The Great Animal Soak (that's what I'm calling it now), Hubs and I were still desperate for a shower. We had spent the night atop an icy cold water bed because we had no hot water. And we were dirty from the move the previous day. We were just pretty miserable in general.
But determined to keep up our spirits, we assured each other that it couldn't get any worse than it had the day before, and set out with the trailer back to our old house. The top things on our collection list were some extra towels and the washer and dryer. We just. Wanted. To get. Clean.
About five miles from our new house, we both noticed that the car was driving kind of funny. So we pulled into a gas station to put some more air in the tires, just to find out that the trailer we had rented had a flat. So we called Home Depot and explained the problem. They told us to call AAA, who would fix it. We called AAA. They refused to fix it, saying they only fixed vehicles and not flatbed trailers. *sigh* So we called Home Depot back. After about an hour of back and forth calls, the Home Depot store manager finally got on the line. Ten minutes after Home Depot had closed, she finally agreed to fix our flat herself. Well, that's all well and good, I guess. Except that she had no knowledge of the area that we were in. And she was over an hour away.
About the time that Hubs got off the phone with her, it started to snow.
Four hours later, the store manager shows up with a spare and a tire iron. What's the first thing she says? "I've never changed a tire before."
So with a sigh, Hubs gets out in the cold, changes the tire himself, and we're on the road again.
We get to our old house and pick up the towels and the washer and dryer, and actually manage to make it home with no problems. As if that wasn't a turn for the better, we now officially have hot water as well. Yay!
I shouldn't have let myself get excited.
Hubs was in the laundry room attempting to hook up the washer and dryer as I was unpacking dishes in the kitchen. Suddenly, a loud metallic groaning sound pulled me out of my daydreams. Before I had the chance to say, "What was that," I hear "FUUUUU**K!" "WSSSSSHHH!"
Of course I drop everything and come running, thinking that Hubs had gotten himself hurt again. That tends to happen when he tries to fix things. But the sight that I witness upon running into the laundry room was so much worse than a jammed finger.
A geyser of water was spraying from the wall behind the washer...straight into my ceiling. Hubs yelled, "Go turn off the water!" Yeah. Cause I totally know where the water cut off is. Sure.
Thank goodness Hubs had the forethought to check where it was when we bought the place. He dashed into the basement and cut it off before it could get too bad. Apparently the threaded connector on the hose was so rusted that when Hubs was trying to unscrew it from the wall and screw it into the back of the washer, the piping snapped. He broke the piping before he could get that hose unscrewed. Mmm...strongman...
As sexy as it was to see my guy be all muscly, we now had another problem. There was no way to hook up the washer, we had gone from having not hot water to no water at all, and I had to use every last towel we had grabbed to clean up the water.
We still needed showers.
Epilogue:
To ice this little cake of disaster that was our moving experience, I have to add that the next day, the plumber charged us almost $500 to fix the piping. In the middle of his work, our neighbor, Awesome John, came over to see what was up. When Hubs explained the situation, Awesome John proceeded to tell him that not only did he have all the tools to fix the piping for free, but that he'd done it before. Go figure.
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