Electricians, plumbers, exterminators – oh my!

It’s really almost not possible that only one thing can go wrong at once, I suppose… Last week when my husband was at work, I went upstairs to get something and noticed the closet light wouldn’t go on. Huh, ok, I went to turn on the bathroom light for ambient light reflect – nope. Ok, that’s not good. What else isn’t working? All told – none of the bathrooms (there are 3), the closet and a number of outlets. Ugh.

The next morning I was sitting in the living room getting ready to call the home warranty people (thank goodness for that!) when I looked up and was pretty sure I’d figured out the source of the electrical problem – the water damage in the ceiling from a leak somewhere!

The home warranty sent a contractor the next morning. He figured out the electrical and – it actually had nothing to do with the plumbing issue! This was just random multi-system failure. Oh, and he didn’t do plumbing. We called back the home warranty and the plumber arrived later that day. Yup, just a random leak from the bath tub – that involved cutting a big hole in our living room ceiling. Oh, and they don’t do dry wall.

And, in our weekend of repairs, finally came the last one – the exterminator. I’d tried my best! We’d put traps everywhere! I’d gone nuts with vinegar all over the house (my dry hands attest). I’d been killing them in droves (my husband’s deerslayer jokes were getting so old…) and had the wounds to prove it! Literally – I’d noticed a huge parade of them cutting across the tops of my cabinets and kept jumping up on the counter to reach up and kill them. The next day I noticed my knees were all black and blue from this effort. (Having always been short, I’d always jumped up on the counter to reach stuff with no issue. So now, I’m not only depressed about the vermin, but also … I’m old!) So we’d brought out the big guns! He sprayed outside. He put the uber bait in the hot spots and we waited.

And they came. They came in such numbers to the poisoned bait! Holy heck! How many were living here?! What’s worse is – some traps didn’t seem to be catching much, so we’d move them to other “unmanned” areas where we’d see a few ants and another onslaught would show up!

Luckily the numbers have slowed now, but God only knows if we’re actually making any progress against them. Here’s hoping. Two out of three (electricity and plumbing) is not good enough this time!

I can’t be the only one! What were your worst everything breaks at once stories? Can you top 3 contractors in a week? (By the way, to be fair, the dry wall guy should be coming to fix that whole in the ceiling soon, so we’ve got 4th on the way…)