The Not-So-Natural Disaster

This is the story of my week.

It all started Thursday morning when I woke up. The apartment was stinky, the litter box was overflowing, the laundry I had been folding for 2 days was in a pile in the basket, and the cat had pooped in the kitchen-not that I could tell where the kitchen was thanks to all the dishes that needed to be done. You see, I had been battling with some health issues for about a week and had basically “taken time off” if you will to rest because I was feeling so poorly. In fact, I was told to rest. The only problem is, the people telling you to rest generally don’t realize that if they don’t pick up the slack, nothing will get done. So, here it was Thursday morning and I snapped. I couldn’t rest any more. I got as much of the mess cleaned up as possible that morning and decided to take a break before I tackled scrubbing the bathrooms and mopping the floors-you know, all the “extras” that need to be done but don’t really affect how your apartment looks. I just couldn’t make myself keep moving. My body was exhausted and sore. I just wasn’t able to get to the minor details that day. I figured I would tackle them the next morning when I would hopefully be feeling better.

Thursday night was like any other night. Willie and I watched Project Runway and then headed to bed a little after midnight. Next thing I know, we are both being abruptly awoken by someone pounding on our door. I hear a lot of commotion upstairs and outside so I waited a minute to see if our neighbors were just getting rowdy. Then they knocked again and started ringing the doorbell, so Willie went to see who it was. We were both pretty worried at this point because just a few short weeks ago we got a notice from the police department stating that ground-level apartments in our area were getting broken into, and that their “technique” was that they knocked on the door to see if anyone was home, and if not they came in through a window. So Willie answers the door and it’s the maintenance man, who says that our upstairs neighbors had a pipe bust under their bathroom sink and he needed to check and see if it was leaking into our apartment. Sure enough, he didn’t even have to get all the way to the bathroom before water started squishing up around his feet. Half of our apartment was already flooded, and the water was coming down at an alarming rate. We checked and it was half way into Addie’s room, all through our dining room and front bathroom, down the hall, and making it’s way into our living room. That’s not to mention the water that seeped through the floor boards into the back bathroom and our closet. It was a huge mess. Huge.

The cleaning guy came knocking on our door an hour later to clean up the water (6 a.m.) and he told me that they were going to place two fans in our apartment which would hopefully get the mess cleaned up by Monday…Yes…Monday. We were facing three days with wet carpet, noisy fans, and electrical cords everywhere; all of this with a toddler. Oh, did I mention that he said it was going to start to smell? Lovely. So, we waited for the office to open up and headed down there to see what was going to happen. I’m sorry, but I was not going to stay in that apartment.

I went down there and the girl in the office didn’t even know anything about flooding or a busted pipe. She asked if I had called the emergency number to get it fixed or if it was still leaking, so of course I had to walk her through the whole situation. She said the manager would be back in an hour and that we should talk to her, so we went to Starbucks and got coffee. The whole time we were gone we discussed what we needed to tell them and what we wanted from the situation-which was really only a clean, quiet place to stay while they worked on our apartment. We were so worried we were just going to be told some excuse as to why they couldn’t temporarily move us. As it turns out, they were moot worries since the office manager called us 30 minutes later to “discuss our options.” She wanted to move us!! Hallelujah! She was basically willing to do anything we wanted at that point to keep us happy, and offered us the model home which is fully furnished, and the same size as ours.

After further inspection, it appeared our apartment got the majority of the damage. The reason they wanted to move us is so they could put more equipment in our apartment-so much more that it would no longer be advisable for us to stay there at all. I’m not entirely sure how that happened since the pipe that broke wasn’t in our apartment and we aren’t on the bottom floor, but that’s apparently what happened. The water decided to pool in our dining room instead of leaking through to the bottom level. Because of this, we were not able to come back home until yesterday (Tuesday).

We went back to our apartment that afternoon to get some things we would need for our stay, and I saw our apartment through the eyes of an outsider. For all the work I had done the day before, our place was still an embarrassment to me. I couldn’t believe there were strangers coming in and out thinking this was the way I normally lived. I try so hard to keep up with two cats, one toddler, and one grown adult every day in such a small area, I was bound to get behind at some point and let things pile up. It’s just what happens when you’re the only person in a household that wants the place to look nice. I told Willie while we were in there, “this is God’s way of punishing me for keeping a messy apartment.”

Moral of this story: Clean!! Clean even when you are sick. You never know when a pipe will bust upstairs and you will have strangers coming into your apartment and judging you because there is food on the floor and dirty dishes in the sink.