“How about the stuffed moose?”
“The moose is in. Definitely.”
My wife grabbed the moose and made her way along the tight, meandering “path” through what had once been our garage but now looked like opening night at a community rummage sale.
“Be careful where you step,” I yelled from behind a stack of books. “I think I dropped the smiling Buddha when I was moving my hard hat and safety vest. I see it. It’s here beside Gumby and Pokey.”
I had a leak. Well not me, actually, but my office. During the one substantial rainfall of the year water rose in our atrium until, like some kind of evil vapor, it found its way through the wall, over the slab and under my carpet. I thought it would dry out if I waited long enough, but when the ducks moved in I knew I had to do something.
I started by peeling back the carpet as far as I could without actually moving anything, but two inches was not enough to assess the full damage. So I jacked up a corner of my U-shaped, wrap-around desk.
Then I peeled the carpet back further. My wife and I took a look and came to the same conclusion -- it was quite wet. The ducks joyfully agreed.
“I think we are going to have to pull up the entire carpet,” my wife said.
We looked at all the stuff that was sitting on the carpet including the huge desk, file cabinet, credenza, bookcases and a smattering of items collected over the last two decades. We decided to sell the house instead and start over somewhere new.
“We can’t sell the house” my wife said. “Come on, how long can it take to disassemble everything and move it to the garage?”
Fast-forward two days. My back is killing me. My arms are sore. My legs hurt. I have a kink in my neck. Quack, quack. The ducks moved on to find someone else’s flooded office.
After a beer with an ibuprofen bump, I tore up the carpet and we hauled it – where else – into the garage. Then I carefully removed a piece of the baseboard, to see if the wallboard was okay, breaking the baseboard in two pieces. “Probably time to replace it anyway,” I told my wife.
She agreed, adding: “You know, we might as well paint too. How hard can that be?”
Fast-forward two days. My back is killing me. My arms are sore. My legs hurt. I have a kink in my other neck. We called the carpet guy. He looked it over and said no problem. Except for the missing baseboards.
I took careful measurements, headed to Home Improvement, and we picked out some cool-looking baseboards, which I carefully cut to the exact dimensions. When I took them home they didn’t fit. Plus, the cool design was hard to match up in the corners. I had to trim and shape each piece several times, messing up the paint. So, when I got them installed, I carefully painted them, getting white paint all over my new green walls. Then I touched up the walls, getting green paint all over my white baseboards.
Fast-forward to present. “The new office looks great!” my wife said.
All I could see was every single little spot where green should have been white and white should have been green. But perfect or not it was time to put everything back into the office and get back to writing.
“Everything?” my wife said. It looks so nice and spacious now.
“Hmmm. Maybe things should earn their way back according to their importance.” Good idea.
“What about this little egg-man with the sombrero and tequila bottle from Fiesta?”
“Oh that’s definitely in,” I said.
“And this, of course.” I handed her the pod person I had made at Lotusland family day out of cones, twigs, branches and seedpods. “And this.” I held up my golf ball display rack.
We looked around the garage at the remaining furniture, office equipment, boxes and boxes of books magazines, and copies of every Montecito Journal my column had been in for the last 15 years.
“Maybe I should throw a few things away,” I said.
My wife grabbed her phone. “I’ll call Marborg Disposal and ask for their largest dump truck.”