First off, no cleaning crew had come to clean. That meant two days worth of cleaning top to bottom a house which (as we found out from the neighbor) had been vacant for three years! I've never seen so many house spiders in one place before. I ended up cleaning the laminate floors downstairs five times, and even then, I think I wasn't fully satisfied with them; my mother had to finally tell me they were good enough for the time being.
Then we noticed the garage door was broken (cracked) and the automatic opener had been disassembled (and there was no remote, the owner had lost it).
Really, none of this was too bad yet, especially since we had a lot of family willing to help get things cleaned up and moved in.
We started moving (cleaning) on Friday. We had an online deal for movers, but since it only allowed for two hours, we planned on having them move only furniture, no boxes. They were originally scheduled to come at 7pm Sunday night, so we thought we'd have plenty of time to move all the small stuff over. So Saturday evening, as we were getting ready to relax and have a good night's sleep before an early start on Sunday, the moving company called: they had a cancellation, and if we were available, we could reschedule the movers for 10am on Sunday. We were thrilled! This meant no late-night moving! But oh, wait, it was 8:30 at night and we hadn't moved ANYTHING because we had been so busy cleaning. Cue two SUVs and two pickup trucks rotating through parking spots at the apartment, jam-packing boxes and loose items (when we ran out of boxes) in them for about two hours. Then it was over to the townhouse to unload everything into the garage and living room (we'd sort it out later...famous last words). At this point it was about 11pm, and the small stuff still wasn't all moved. Who knew you could cram so much stuff into an 800 square foot apartment?!
Our parents went home around 11:30pm, and fiance and I stayed and tried to put away as much as we could manage. But by midnight, we were ready to collapse. We went back to the apartment and went to bed.
We woke up at 6am to get moving again. More packing boxes (a friend supplied more boxes at the last minute, thank goodness!), cramming them in trucks and SUVs, and at noon (yes, two hours late) the movers arrived. Who were moving slow. as. crap. My dad eventually bribed them to make sure they stayed within the two hours, because if they went over it was $95 an hour! We certainly couldn't afford that. They ended up finishing moving everything with five measly minutes to spare. But hey, under two hours is under two hours, any way you look at it.
Everyone was there helping, but by dinner time I was exhausted. Fiance and I went to my mom's for dinner (Sunday ritual) and pulled an eat-and-run. We had way too much to get done to stay and chit chat! With food in our bellies, but still plenty tired, fiance hooked up our washing machine so I could wash our sheets and we could get to bed.
I was standing at the sink, unpacking and washing dishes, when I hear a little drip drip drip coming from somewhere near the front door.
Before I continue, I have to explain the layout of the house. When you walk in the front door, which opens to the right, you can immediately see the garage door to the left, and behind the open door is where the powder room is.
So I went over to the entryway to investigate the drip. It sounded like it was coming from the sink in the powder room, so I stuck my head in to find the sink completely dry. I thought it might be dripping under the sink in the cabinet, so I turned on the light to check it out. That was when I noticed it was actually the toilet. There was a small puddle on the floor around the base of the toilet. Whatever, no big deal. I called to fiance to come take a look. He lifted the seat to reveal the bowl full to the brim with water. Oh, the toilet seems to be clogged. How strange. No one was even using it! That was our attitude at this point.
When the water started receding a bit, fiance flushed the toilet to try to use the additional water pressure to unclog the pipes. No go. The water slowly came back up and over the brim, getting the floor even wetter. I went to get a roll of paper towels. -Ha!- As we were mopping up the water with my flimsy paper towels, the water receded yet again, and came back up again - but this time it didn't stop. Fiance reached down and turned the water valve off, and as he stood back up the water started gushing out of the toilet! And it would not stop!! We both started yelling and running around in a panic to get towels. As fiance ran into the garage to find more towels, I yelled to him, "Shut off the washing machine!"
He yelled back, "What's the point of that?!" but as he spoke, he hit the button, and the water all stopped. We shakily proceeded to call the emergency maintenance line at the management company. We left them a message. Then I called my mother, and started to cry.
She thought the whole thing was pretty funny, and as soon as I explained why I was actually upset, I began to see the humor in the situation, too. I remember crying, "I've just never seen a toilet overflow because the washing machine was running!" and somehow managing to laugh at the same time. Don't you just hate having conflicting emotions like that?!
I'll have to finish the story tomorrow (that's right, it's not over just yet.), it's getting rather late. Until then!
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