Once More with Feeling

This summer has been intense. I kicked it off with surgery, found myself a bit mired in day job stress, traveled across the country to mourn my grandmother's passing, moved my kid into a house closer to campus, and in the "this area is finally fully exposed" cleaning frenzy discovered that the pesky mold problem had not spared that room after all.

I'll have a separate post about my grandmother at a later date (I haven't quite figured out how I want to process that grief yet), and I know I have more to say on the whole empty nest situation as well, but this post is all about Mold Remediation 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Given the layout of the impacted room and the possibility that some shared walls meant our hall linen closet would need attention (and the sensibilities of our diabetic cat), we opted to seal off our stairs fully. This meant we would likely not have access to our bedroom and, more importantly, our shower. For a brief moment earlier this week, things seemed to be shifting in our favor to allow use to still access the upstairs. Then we did a sanity check in an area of the stairwell wall, just to make sure nothing was lurking behind the wall. And, alas, we found A Lot. So we are back to being fully limited to our downstairs. Hey, there's a half bath, our laundry room, and our kitchen down here. I just washed my hair in the kitchen sink. We have very comfy reclining couches and a cushy air mattress. The dining room table has become my office/studio.

We'll skip right over the part where I forgot to bring down any paintbrushes from my studio before we fully lost access to the upstairs. I guess I'll have to stop by the art supply store and get some new ones. I'm crying real tears over here, truly.

If all goes well with the last bits of remediation, we should be able to get back into that part of the house on Wednesday. It's going to be a long minute before everything is fully repaired, so we'll have all kinds of chaos to maneuver around. I will likely keep my office set up at the dining room table so I don't get trapped upstairs during active repair moments. And that should give me plenty of time in the evenings to get some art going in my actual studio.

Given all the givens, we've also got the folks who refreshed our kitchen drafting up plans and quotes for our bathrooms. They are the last areas of the house that haven't had a wall cracked into, so may as well see what the cost would be to get those rooms sorted. The day job seems interested in keeping me on past my original contract term, and if a few more months of clinical research moonlighting means we clear out any last pockets of concern, it could be worth it.

Mentally I am doing a little better with this round of house chaos. Having half the house be fully unaffected does help, especially having a fully functional kitchen. And all of this work means we are closer to hopefully clearing up a big trigger for my health issues. (My integrative health specialist thinks this is THE trigger and could fully resolve all the wobbliness I've been dealing with for over a decade, but my health journey has taught me to treat such ideas as a siren song.)

I do have big plans for the rest of the year, including my first art fest booth and some holiday sales. Once we get the house into a better steady state, I'll start mapping that out and sharing.