Tiny Fire, Day 50: Last week, we realized that the electricians we were using were trying to gouge us (or rather, our insurance company) for $10,fucking,000 on a new breaker box that didn't need to be replaced, and we are now working with someone else who took one look at the situation and said, "there's nothing wrong with that. what." Our insurance had been balking at signing off on renovations for reasons that are now apparent, and so with that out of the way, painting has Begun.
My dog is not happy about it. Yesterday, the painting crew blew in and spackled, sanded, primed, and sealed THE ENTIRE UPSTAIRS. Like, two rooms, two closets, a hallway, ceilings, and an open stairwell wall that is really a lot more wallage than a stairwell ought to have. I don't know what alll the banging and crashing was--I think they dropped an elephant at one point--but they seem to be doing good work as well as fast work. (The last time those rooms got painted--because the roof leaked into my bedroom and onto the wall the two rooms share--the ceiling turned out very half-assed and streaky). (You may have noticed a pattern of home repair catastrophes here.)
Today, they are painting the actual paint. They expect to be DONE today. The whole job, done. This is the first and only renovation work that has been done, and this crew has arrived from nowhere near the region of fucking around. I honestly don't know how to handle it. And my dog has been Unhappy about it, yelling pretty much all day. He is currently walking around downstairs in a very administrative fashion, occasionally throwing out a disapproving bark, just to make sure you know.
The next step will be to have 3-4 different types of contractors in to repair the charred wood in the roof, fix the burned PVC pipes, clean out the contaminated ducts, replace the burned insulation, install a new toilet, rewire any wiring that got fried, remove exhaust fans that could also catch fire from other bathrooms, put combination fire/CO alarms in every bedroom per city code, and build a new bathroom ceiling. Then: we carpet.
I want to remind you that this is a fire that burned less than 15 minutes. It didn't even burn long enough to set off the hallway fire alarm. The problem is what burned, and how wood smoke and chemical contamination from inside the roof spread through the air ducts to the entire floor (and then residue sat there on everything for a month while everybody fucked around arguing). And I tell you this mostly because I didn't have any idea that a really minor electrical fire could play out like this. And now you know.
Again, we're all okay and unharmed and the house is standing and like 99% structurally undamaged. It is just the kind of prolonged low-stakes ordeal that is REALLY TYPICAL of shit that happens to us. Between this and the basement flooding of '23, I am honestly scared that something is going to happen to the ground floor of the house now.
Also, I am furious that I lost six weeks of my life to electrician fraud.
