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Five Days of Trying to Manage Chaos During the Pandemic
On April 4, we saw some peeling paint on the trim around the entrance to our family room. We had also noticed that our floor boards looked weird the last couple of days, but chose to ignore it. Can you blame us? Sheltering in place and trying to obtain basic food and drugstore needs was exhausting enough for a couple in their seventies. We felt we had done a pretty good job of keeping safe. Then, we realized something was leaking and starting to cause a lot of damage to the house we had put on the market at the worst time ever.
Now we had to call in plumbers to find the source of the water that was causing all of this damage. When the two plumbers arrived, they were wearing masks and booties. In our anxiety, we didn’t ask them to wash their hands or use hand sanitizer. Many hours later, they had been all over the house trying to locate the source of the leak. They reset the toilet in one bathroom and had their hands all over the vanity and cabinets in the other. They chopped holes in the family room ceiling and touched who knows what in the basement. One had removed his mask at some point because he couldn’t breathe. I empathized but started to feel very anxious. The plumbers told us to call a restoration company to get all of the moisture out of the walls and floors, and to call our insurance agent.
