This week I decided I’d reorganize my overly crowded closet. I made the decision to throw out all the wood panels I’d made for painting a few years ago. Since I made them myself they were poor quality and at this rate I was never really going to finish another painting. They were just taking up space.
After removing all the paintings from the closet I saw this:
There was copious mold and water damage to the floor and the walls. Because this was right where the paintings had been for 2.5 years several of them had canvas and stretchers that had had been completely eaten away.
Over the next five days I’d go through a process of having our handymen come look at the damage and slowly repair it, evaluating one day, taking out the wall the next, dry-walling the next, etc. This didn’t go over well at work, as I’d have to work from home for half the day for nearly a whole week.
What the problem turned out to be was when the flippers flipped our place they installed a new shower-head pipe in the guest bathroom – and on the INSIDE (as in, inside the wall, where nobody can see without removing the wall) connecting portion they didn’t install the little white threading that makes the connection water tight. So every time we had a guest over and they ran the shower it leaked inside the wall. Over time this built up and totally rotted out the lower part of the wall and carpet padding.
Even worse was the damage to my old paintings. I know I’ll never sell them or do anything useful with them, but it was painful to have to cut them off of their now molded to crumbling black bits stretcher bars and try to clean up. Several paintings required cutting into the actual artwork to remove canvas with water damage.
The only good thing was that during this whole adventure Sam was on her yearly work trip to China, so she never had to live in the house cluttered up with all the closet inhabitants sitting outside – and workmen trampling through every morning. It was all cleaned up and put back together by the time she came back, so her only exposure to it was a lot like yours.
By the way – that bit about never finishing another painting, it’s not necessary a sad thing, it’s because I’m spending my time working on two other projects, two scripts and two novels. One of which (novels) I hope to have in the Amazon Kindle store in January.
If you’re curious my friend that did the cover art already posted his work in his year-end wrap up here.
