A far wiser man than I, I’m not sure if it was Plato or perhaps Willie Nelson, said, “It’s always something.” That platitude has come to define a good portion of my life, and never more so than recently when we put a new roof on the house.
I can’t think of a less satisfying major purchase than a new roof. My partner and I did not want to do it, and since we chose the exact same roof tile that we had before, there was not even the thrill of a new look. But on rainy days we had buckets in every room in the house, and the suspiciously musty, moldy smell that was once restricted to the attic was now permeating the master bedroom and bathroom, so we bit the bullet.
We decided to do the roof in October, when the rainy season was presumably over, and the day they tore off the old roof we had a deluge of Biblical proportions. The roofing crew thoughtfully covered the old roof with blue tarps and went home. For the rest of the week they came back at 8 every morning and pulled off the blue tarps, which was the signal for the deluge to return, so they would put the blue tarps back on and go home, at which point the rain stopped.
Even though the roofers were not getting much done the other workers were quite productive. The drywall guys took a break from tearing off the moldy, saturated wall board in the bedroom to allow the electricians to rewire the entire room because the rainwater had caused a couple of short circuits.
“Well, “ I said to my partner. “That explains why those wall outlets didn’t work.”
He nodded grimly. “I thought it was odd that I would get shocked every time I took a shower.”
“It’s always something,” I said.
The electricians had to pause their work because the plumbers had to replace the shower valves which had somehow corroded. The two plumbers looked like twins: huge steroided-out young guys. We could never remember their names, and we could not tell them apart, so we called them, privately, “Dumb” and “Dumber.”
The plumbers were at our house every day for a week and every day they had ask for directions “Uh, where are you located again?” Dumb would ask me on the phone me while Dumber simultaneously sent me a text message. “What’s your address again?”
Dumb told me that if they could tear down the wall in the closet on the other side of the shower they could repair the valves and not have to remove any tile.
I began to hyperventilate. “Don’t touch the tile,” I said. “It’s almost 60 years old and in really good shape. I’ll never be able to match it if you remove any.”
Dumber was reassuring. “Oh, we won’t remove it. Maybe just crack it or chip it a little.” My jaw dropped. “You hang a towel over it and no one is the wiser,” he said winking, and patted me on the shoulder with a beefy paw.
I went into the kitchen where my partner, pale, was looking at our check book. “What did Dumb have to say?” he asked.
I decided to be kind. “He can save the tile, no problem,” I said, just as we heard what sounded like a wall of 60 year old tile crashing to the floor.
We stared at each other and I pried the checkbook out of my partner’s hands and put it away. “It’s always something,” I said.