Got the disaster out of the way

So, my bathroom renovation got delayed a few days (due to supply issues), and then started today.

You know how every home renovation project always has some major disaster, usually towards the end? This time we at least got it out of the way right away: while they were removing the sink cabinet, a pipe burst.

Fortunately nothing got badly soaked, and what got wet has dried off pretty quickly. I don’t think there’s any specific water damage to anything (although that was an extremely close call for my entire recording studio), although only time will tell. The main issue of concern is that my guitars and some of my acoustic treatments were directly below the water blast. The guitars have dried out easily, and the acoustic treatment is easy to replace if it gets moldy (it’s just cheap acoustic foam which I have plenty of).

The more annoying thing is that while I was planning on being without a bathroom for a few days, I wasn’t planning on being without running water entirely. Also, this has seriously bumped up the timetable for getting the plumbing redone in my house — as in, it needs to happen now, although it’s something I wanted to do sooner rather than later anyway — and has also greatly lengthened the duration of the project as a whole. I’m guessing that this will also require doing way more basement prep. The contractor also thinks that this will add around $6000 to the total bill. Not financially devastating or anything (and well within the extra budget I’d set aside for the project), but, dang.

(And at least it happened with contractors on the site already, instead of being a 3 AM burst pipe with no warning.)

On the plus side, it means I’ll finally have a chance to get things reorganized how I want it to now that I’ve been using the basement as a project space.

Anyway, for the next little while I’ll be staying at my neighbor’s place, and I guess my recording setup will have to be pretty minimal (since it’ll be hard to get work done with an industrial dehumidifier blaring away). But all I needed during my trip to Port Angeles last year was my laptop and portable keyboard and I made some pretty great music (tracks 9-12, specifically). And this time if there’s something I need I can just run home and get it.

I mean, realistically I’ll probably still work my day job from the home office, it just means I have a bit further to go to use the bathroom.

I guess the other thing that’s gonna happen is my cats (especially Tyler) will finally get used to not having me around at night. I’ve been trying to sleep with the door closed every few days and that usually goes… badly, but we’ll see.

Also this means the project is going to take a lot longer. The original plan was around a week. Now it seems like it’ll be more like two. And a lot of that will just be waiting for the contractor to get a bunch of stuff he wasn’t expecting to need to do; plumbers are in pretty high demand right now, for example. Also, Rick can only house me for a bit over a week. If things get really tight I might have to partially move back in to my condo. I guess for once I’m kind of glad that it hasn’t sold yet? (Although if it had, an AirBnB would have been cheaper by the day anyway…)

The most surprising thing to me is that during all of this crisis I’ve been feeling calm and weirdly optimistic. You’d think I’d be melting down due to stress right now. Maybe that’ll set in later. Who knows.

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