When I moved into this house, as a renter, it did not surprise me to find a cheap fiberglass whirlpool that had been DIY’ed into place by the landlord. He hadn’t bothered to ensure that the flooring was even when he’d installed it, so the bottom of the tub had cracked as a result.
(This is the guy that used to run an illegal woodworking shop out of the shed behind the rental property, so obviously, words like ‘permit’ and ‘inspection’ didn’t hold a whole lot of meaning for him. The village forced him to close the woodworking shop because they had this crazy idea that a place where power tools and flammable chemicals like varnish come together should have things like smoke detectors and sprinklers–an idea this guy disagreed with. Fun fact: the entire time I was renting the house, it had zero smoke detectors in it, either.)
Anyway, he’d mistakenly believed that he could just spackle the tub crack away, in between tenants, but the crack had just opened up again the moment I first set foot in it, because he didn’t actually, you know, fix the floor underneath it. As a renter, I felt no ownership of that crack. I slapped some duct tape on it and kept on showering, because that crack was someone else’s problem.
…And then I bought the house, and that duct tape has now been there for five years, and that crack is DEFINITELY my problem.
This isn’t ENTIRELY a Lazy Homeowner Thing (like, for example, not doing your yard work). Bathrooms are EXPENSIVE, and I just knew that, once I cracked open that Pandora’s Box of home repair, seven decades’ worth of horrifying amateur workmanship were likely to come spilling out of the walls like those trick Pringles cans with the spring coiled up in side, but EVERYWHERE and FOREVER.
So, I finally saved up enough money to get rid of the duct tape, and the half a room’s worth of other home repair problems that the contractor informed me are hopelessly entangled in the process of getting rid of the duct tape, because a whirlpool involves plumbing AND electricity, so since they’re touching both those things, my house now has to be brought up to code on BOTH. Today was the first step in the duct tape removal process. Today, they would be taking a sledgehammer to that tub.
In a case of the worst timing ever, today was also the day of the board meeting my employer is hosting, featuring distinguished subject matter experts and guests from around the world, which I would be hosting from my laptop, from my house, because I’m the only one involved who knows how start and control a Webex meeting. This made me…very nervous. But the sledgehammer was supposed to be in the morning, and the big meeting was in the afternoon. It would probably all work out fine, right? Some guy named Andy was supposed to arrive at 7 AM with that sledgehammer. Seven-a-freaking-emm.
At 8:15, a white truck that said ‘interior remodeling’ on the side pulled up in front of my house.
At 8:25, two guys got out and knocked on my door.
As soon as I opened the door, a wave of cigarette smoke seeped in around the edges of my mask. It now became clear why it had taken them ten minutes to exit their vehicle.
“Hello,” the older one said. “I’m (Janiusz?)”
I blinked. Janiusz (?) was a weird way to say ‘Andy’.
“I’m here with Home Depot? For your demolition?” He held up the paper with my scope of work on them.
“Oh. Sure. Come on in.”
The older guy (Janiusz? Janek? Janko? It was something like that?) came in, and a younger guy in his late teens/early twenties, presumably his son, trailed behind. The J man stood in the bathroom, looking at the scope of work, and it became apparent that he’d neither seen nor discussed it with anyone before.
“So we take out the tub?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“And these walls?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And this wall?”
I frowned. “Nothing’s being done to that wall.”
“But it’s tile too!”
“But it’s staying. The walls you’re taking down are getting replaced with acrylic.”
“But it’s not going to…” muttering in Polish ensued. “It’s fine, I’ll use a…” More muttering in Polish.
I didn’t even have time to be alarmed about what the muttering meant. “The toilet is staying?” He asked.
“No,” I said. “The toilet is going.” I have to admit, they had talked me into a new toilet. They would have to temporarily remove the one that was there to install the new tub, anyway. It was only a little bit extra to have them put back a shiny new one with extra height and a lid that would automatically close when you stood up, instead of my old cheap one…
Jan…us? looked around. “But…there is only one toilet here!”
“They’re bringing a new one!”
“But you will need one to use in the mean time!”
“They said this one could stay in until they absolutely needed it out!”
“I need it out to take apart the tub!”
The younger guy was just watching all this with amusement.
I rolled my eyes. “Could you take out the toilet, do what you need to do, and put the toilet back?”
The J Man stared at the toilet for a second. “Yes. We could do that.”
For the next hour, I tried to work in the kitchen while tuning out the sounds of two men locked in my bathroom, banging on things and speaking to each other animatedly to each other in Polish. I tried very hard not to be disconcerted by this, but it was difficult. I don’t actually speak Polish; I just pretend to speak Polish when people approach me on street corners asking me to sign up for random subscriptions.
***
Jan…ko? and his young apprentice left around 9:30, after piling the shattered remnants of my bathtub and three tiled walls helpfully in front of my garage door.
At 10:30, a different dude arrived with a truck full of bathroom fixtures, and some of them were mine. The rest, he explained as he unloaded, belonged to a different customer who had not wanted them to store all that stuff at her house until they were ready to install it.
I did not know that was an option.
He gestured to the pile of shattered bathroom pieces. “I know Andy probably expected me to haul that stuff away,” he said, “but I don’t want to risk scratching the other customer’s stuff. They’ll probably get it on tomorrow’s run.”
“Makes sense. Could you at least shove it into the carport or something, so I can actually use the garage? My car is in there.”
The guy complied, and then started fitting boxes full of bathroom fixtures into various nooks and crannies around my car. I stood there watching, not really knowing what to do with myself. “It wasn’t Andy, this morning, by the way?”
He looked surprised. “I’m sure it was one of Andy’s guys. Was it–” he rattled off a bunch of names, and I shook my head at each one. When he started asking me what type of vehicle the guy was driving, I got tired of this game. “It was some Polish guy.”
He looked at me funny. “They’re all Polish guys.”
***
Robert was due to arrive at 11:00 to start the plumbing work. He arrived promptly and did, in fact, introduce himself as Robert.
After about 45 minutes of work, he came to find me and led me to the bathroom. “This floor’s all warped,” he said, jumping up and down on it to demonstrate it rippling like the waves of Lake Michigan.
“You’re not telling me anything that surprises me,” I replied. “That’s what ruined the last tub.”
“I’m surprised Andy didn’t do something about it this morning,” he said. “If I try to put the tub on top of it, it will cause problems eventually, and now we’ll have to wait for a contractor to fix it and move back your inspection.”
“It wasn’t Andy this morning,” I replied.
Robert looked surprised. “Who was it?”
“Some Polish guy.”
“Was it–” he started rattling off vaguely Slavic-sounding names, but none of them sounded right.
“No, it was…Jan-ek? Jan-os? Something like that.”
Robert’s eyes narrowed. “I’m calling my boss.”
Robert stepped outside to have a lengthy conversation with the Head Contractor In Charge, and came back to inform me that he was going to Home Depot. “I’m getting some wood and fixing this myself,” he said. “That way your inspection stays on track, and we don’t have to call Janiusz back in.”
There was no tone in his voice or expression on his face, but I could somehow just tell that he also thought this would be a bad idea. I also got the feeling that Andy, whoever he was, was in big trouble for delegating this job to The J Man.
***
Things were finally going smoothly. Robert had wrapped up his work about an hour into my three-hour virtual board meeting, and I think the attendees only accidentally heard construction noises in my microphone once or twice. I had located a shirt that looked fancy from the shoulders up, which was all that mattered, and was wearing it with my nicest sweat pants while sitting in front of my kitchen windows, one of few stretches of wall in my entire house that doesn’t have cartoon or science fiction characters somewhere on it.
My phone buzzed a severe thunderstorm warning. I wasn’t overly concerned. I lived a decade in Florida, after all. I SLEPT through Hurricane Wilma. Thunderstorms were nothing.
There was, though, a teensy kernel of concern. I was the Webex host for this meeting. If my power–or my wifi–went out, the meeting would die immediately.
My boss was taking the meeting from our actual office, on one of the top floors of a skyscraper on the Magnificent Mile. The rest of us staff were remote. After a few minutes, my colleague in Naperville turned off her video feed, and moments later I got a text from her. “Tornado warning here. I hear sirens. moving to shelter.”
I gritted my teeth. A tornado warning was a whole different story. Storms generally came west to east–and my town would be one of the next ones in the path. I wonder if I could sneak away from the meeting, bring in my patio furniture from the carport–
And put it where? I reminded myself. Every spare inch in my garage is crammed with bathroom parts!
Rain was slamming my windows now. It’s fine, I told myself. This is fine. On my laptop screen, I could see the lovely, blue sky out the window behind my boss’s desk–she was probably blissfully unaware that anything weird was happening to her underlings.
Tornado sirens began to sound.
I turned off my video feed, unplugged my laptop, and moved to the only spot in my house where there were no windows: the hallway where the two bedrooms and the bathroom meet. It’s just a little strip, four feet wide by six feet long or so, and there’s no light in the hallway itself, so with the doors shut (because windows) I was sitting in pitch darkness.
The meeting attendees were still in deep, rather boring discussion about the merits of open-access scholarly journals, completely unaware that I was sittting cross-legged on the floor in the dark, heart pounding, trying to get enough of the adrenaline out of my fingers to start typing minutes again.
Outside, a deafening, sustained crashing noise ripped through the air–the sound of wood splintering and structures being torn apart, as if a pair of gigantic beings had decided to go Bowling for Houses.
I imagined that it was my patio furniture slamming into my neighbor’s Shed of Awkward at high speed (the same shed where my former landlord had run his illegal woodworking business). I winced. There was definitely some property damage there.
But no–
Wait–
I remembered what else was in my carport: the destroyed bathroom parts that the delivery guy had, fatefully, been unable to haul to haul away this morning due to another customer’s Karen-ness.
With horror, I realized that the grody pieces of my sledgehammered Tub of Duct Tape were very likely now being flung across the neighborhood at lethal speed by hurricane-force winds.
The lights started to flicker.
I put down the laptop and curled up in a ball.
At this time, my phone rang. It was my dad.
“How’s the construction going?” He asked.
“Construction is over,” I said. “I’m on the board meeting call. Taking minutes. From my hallway. In a tornado.”
“Oh,” he said, clearly only registering the first two parts of that explanation. “Sorry, didn’t realize you were still working.”
***
From there on, the storm was a rather slow and disappointing decrescendo. Eventually, I was able to leave the hallway, return to the kitchen, and turn my video feed back on. (This was shortly after our distinguished board members pointed out to my boss that the sky behind her was turning a murky green and she should probably get to a windowless room.)
Still, I had to survive through another maddening hour of the board meeting before I could go out and survey the damage.
The first thing I saw was the Shed of Awkward, which was without a single dent, scrape or ding. I was astonished. I had certainly heard SOMETHING hit SOMETHING. But none of my patio furniture appeared to have budged an inch. Even the bags of yard waste that were sitting under the carport had remained in place. I rounded the corner to check on the pile of shattered bathroom detritus. A few of the pieces had leaned over in the wind, but it remained exactly as it had been.
That’s when I finally noticed the tree.
The tallest tree in the neighborhood–a gigantic maple tree on the parkway across the street, twice as tall as the apartment buildings it stood in front of–had been sheared in half by the storm, and had toppled right…onto…my…lawn.
Its massive trunk had landed directly on the barrier of tall shrubberies that have been, since my neighbor chopped down my fence without asking, the only thing separating our properties. They were completely flattened. The tree was the fence now. Its branches stretched skyward from its position, reclining on the ground.
I walked along the massive tree trunk, taking pictures of the destruction. When I got to the carport, I noticed a sizable chunk of roof sitting on my patio table. I looked up. Directly above it, a detached tree branch had punched a Hulk-fist-sized hole neatly in the carport roof. The branch was still sticking through.
I reflected, for a moment, on the odds of this thing falling exactly here, where it did the least damage, as opposed to on my garage itself, or even worse, my house.
By the time I called my dad back, I was laughing in, admittedly, a rather unhinged way.
“…Are you okay?” He asked.
“I’m fine!” I said, a little too jovially. “This is what I have homeowner’s insurance for, right?”
Laura Writes 