So – The Squire and I spent several days completely emptying the TV and guest rooms, removing the book cases that separated them, and generally disrupting our lives.
The fellow who is supposed to do the construction work came down and caulked all the windows. We had one good rainstorm, and the porch roof didn’t leak but the TV room window did, so he came back and redid that one. When the water was coming in around the window, The Squire tried mopping it up with a rag. I took a long piece of button twist, thumb-tacked one end in the middle of the puddle, and ran the thread into the trashcan. The water simply followed the path of least resistance, and dribbled into the plastic bucket. You would have thought I’d just invented the wheel, or something.
Today, the man who will be in charge of tearing out both exterior walls came down to take a look at the job. He hesitated a bit about leaving the old ceiling in place in the TV room until The Squire took him into the attic and showed him what would come raining down when he removed the tiles. “Gotcha, boss. You are exactly correct.” You just have to explain things very clearly to some people.
And then he dropped the little bombshell that nothing else could be done until we have another hard rain, the make sure the outside is properly sealed before we start working on the inside. That makes perfect sense, but we could have left some of that stuff in there until we were ready to roll.
Great. There’s no rain in the forecast until the 20th.
Maybe I can get my sewing machine back into the room and the ironing board set back up. Speaking of rolling, the contractors will remove the old rug, but they are not sure what they will find under there, and it is entirely possible we have mold to contend with.
Lovely.
Once we get it all painted, we can call the carpet man and have him come down to install new wall-to-wall. In the meantime, we are camping out in the upstairs.
thisendoftheswamp 
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