Oh no! It actually happened. As you can imagine, I was a bit busy, so I’m only back now.
It’s a weird thing, those ancestors. I’m not convinced that they are on my side. The last time I was thinking a lot about them, I’d found a family tree from the state archives and realized the rumors about nobility in the family were true. As I sat in a cafe in Vilnius, looking at it I got a phone call from my idiot building manager saying I’d just been sued because of his laxness. It cost me $80,000. It’s a long story...
This is costing me $11,000 for new patio doors and new cedar decking. Why so expensive? It’s the way this house is built, and the intelligent thing is to replace them quickly rather than spend a month trying to rebuild the doors and letting the stress get in the way. We are going to have to replace part of the roof (not because it’s damaged but because we have to do that in order to replace part of the wood ceiling that got charred) next year and my carpenter is giving me the entire roof for free, so the cost is basically a wash.
I realize now that there is no magic trick since there is no magic trick. It helps to be FIRE’d. My wife, carpenter, and I spent a *week* on this. We sanded off any burnt bits inside, spraying some parts with smell-trapping paint, even putting tape on some burnt areas that will be replaced. We washed the walls, we washed the ceilings, we washed everything. We took our contemporary oriental rug to the most reputable cleaner in town (nobody would tell me the price and it is 11 x 8 so I was afraid it’d be a fortune but it was $180... nice relief). We borrowed fans from the Unitarian congregation we belong to and replaced the air using positive pressure repeatedly. We replaced the air filters in our AC unit. One of the patio sliders, which is made of mahogany (hence the cost) and is somewhat burnt through still smells, but when you enter the house you won’t probably notice the smell anymore. Since we usually have friends over for dinner, the smells of dinner will usually take over.
I could have used the week for other things and this was enormously disruptive. The first weekend I had to sit down, away from everybody, repeatedly. I was also working 18 hour days on this crap. But my blood pressure is still good, so no lasting toll on me. The house will be better for the money (the old sliders were hard to open and didn’t really lock and the roof does have to go in the next few years).