As I was preparing for my weekend cleaning projects this past Saturday, I encountered a most unpleasant surprise en route to the closet where we keep our cleaning supplies: The hand-woven runner next to the closet was drenched! At first I thought a bottle of cleaning fluid had tipped on its side and spilled all over the floor. But when I opened the closet door, I noticed water dripping from a pipe at the top of the closet and realized it was coming from the washing machine in the guest room on the upper level of our apartment. I went upstairs to confirm my suspicion and, lo and behold, the wood floor was buckling and the washer’s pipes were in fact dripping!
Needless to say, I immediately called our building super, Tony, who rushed up to our apartment with our building handyman, Eric, to help us solve the problem. (If you live in New York, it always helps to be buddies with your superintendent and handyman—and thankfully, Tony and Eric and I get along very well; I have enormous respect for these guys—they help me with problems, large and small, all the time, and I think they like the fact that I’m an extremely appreciative audience for all the good things they do.) Anyway, Tony and Eric swiftly shut off the pipes, which had backed up and overflowed since we hadn’t used the washing machine for years (we have another closet in another part of the apartment containing a new washer and dryer so there’s been no need to use the ones in the guest room). I’d told Tony a while ago, that I was thinking of turning the upstairs laundry closet into bookshelves or a storage place for my sewing and crafts supplies. He suggested that now would be a good time to follow through with that plan. This I will definitely do. And he and Eric are going to help me by taking out the washer and the broken dryer later this week.
Ever one to look for the silver lining in bad experiences, I’m taking the weekend’s misadventure as my cue to make the change that I’ve known for a while will improve the quality of our home. My husband, Anil, will be happy that my extra books will come out of the guest room clothes closet, and I will be happy to have a dedicated place for my extra supplies. Unfortunately, this little matter is opening a whole Pandora’s box of other problems that need tending, including repairing or replacing our already damaged (and now even more damaged) wood floor, creating shelves for the other books I have stored in our coat closet, and repairing or upgrading our clothes closets (the doors of which have come unhinged) to name a few.
I wasn’t quite ready to take on so many things at once, but now I have no choice—the domino effect is playing itself out clearly
in my mind. But tackling my laundry list (never mind the pun) of home improvements and chronicling the process is the point of this blog. So maybe the lining in this minor disaster is even more silvery than I’d first imagined—it’s just the kick-start I
need to get moving. I’ll share my Wish List of home improvements, which I plan to complete over the course of the next year, in another post.
Meanwhile, I hope you’ll join me by sharing your plans and stories for enhancing your own home, so that we can share the joy (and the misery) together—and hopefully learn a few things along the way, too.
