complications

My packing panic has been alleviated by a weekend of, well, packing. Things are coming together. 

The living room now contains a wall's worth of boxes and suitcases and bookshelves and filing cabinets, where I have moved them from the lower bedroom level. I gave away three bags of clothes and shoes. Another three bags of clothes and a box of miscellani are ready to go to St. Vinnie's. 

I have a plan of spending each evening this week going through at least half a box worth of papers. Tonight I have thrown out about an entire grocery bag worth of paper. (Speaking of which: does one need to keep EOBs? What about pay stubs? For how long?)

I threw one of my sets of sheets in the wash yesterday so that I could pack that set and put my favorite set on the bed.

Half an hour later, when I came out of my bedroom, there was water on my bathroom floor, which seemed odd. Heading toward the stairs, I saw, in that moment when you realize that it's all going wrong, that the carpet at the bottom of the stairs was soaked. 

Yup. It was what you think. 

I opened the door to the laundry room, and there was half an inch of water on the floor.

That is never a good thing.

My friend S. happened to be knocking at my door at almost exactly that moment to look through my clothes for tall girl things that might fit her, and she was an immense help. Between J. and S. and I, we wrung out enough towels to fill five buckets of water. 

The landlady told me to call the guy who fixes the place, and I did, and he came over with a shopvac and heaters and fans within half an hour.

The next time I went downstairs, the hall carpet was gone. 

Yeah, it's like that. We are now living in the sort of house where the white noise is almost too loud to be comfortable, what with all the fans, but it can't drown out the noise of footsteps on the bare plywood. We are wearing shoes in the house, lest we be grabbed by little nails sticking out of the wood.

The good news is that the wood dried incredibly fast, probably because we caught it almost instantly.

From inspection of the washer, it appears that the piece of plastic that directs the hose into the tub broke off and directed the hose toward, well, whatever it felt like directing it toward - in this case, the guts of the washer and thereby to the ground. The sheets in the washer were mostly still dry, since all the water had cascaded to the ground.

Come to think of it, I don't actually know if we have a functional washer right now. That would be handy to know.