Plumbing Perils

     This is one of those times when it sucks to be a grown-up.
     We had a sewage backup that took out our downstairs bathroom and part of the surrounding hall. In the future, we will probably be able to look back at this as a minor disaster. It, of course, does not feel like it now. Pipes and flooring are needing replaced, and no matter how much the guys doing the work assure us that it could have been much worse and that insurance will (probably) cover it, it is still painful to watch. My wife and I were literally wincing as we could hear them sawing out chunks of drywall and prying up baseboards. As I type, my wife is going outside to dig out some Easter lily bulbs that will otherwise be destroyed by people fixing our pipe (to get it up to code: another joy of buying an old "fixer-upper").
     I mentioned in an earlier post how important it was that our house felt like home, and things like this make me realize how true that really is. The house itself almost gets anthropomorphized. We've put so much work into it, and watching something outside our control ruin some of it just seems like a cruel trick of fate. My wife kept talking about how much time she spent painting those damn baseboards. Yes, the repairmen will replace them and repaint them exactly the same, and in theory it won't cost us any more than our deductible (which is quite enough, thank you very much). But it doesn't make the destruction any easier to bear.
     I could see it in the repairmen's faces that they just didn't understand our reactions (i.e. that we were upset about all that they were tearing apart). In their mind, it was going to be covered and put back just as it was, so who cares? I wonder if they feel this way about their own homes; I wonder if it's normal to just shrug and repair something that's broken without a second thought. Similarly, I wonder about the people who move from house to house a lot*, or the idea of having a "starter home." This is where you live, how can you not care about it enough to toss it away after a handful of years?
     I'm sure I'm being overly sentimental, and we'll all just have to put up with it until everything gets put back to normal. Hopefully this will happen before Thanksgiving when my family is coming into town. As for now, I'm just going to have to pace nervously while my house is sick, until the experts tell me it's all better.

*I referring, of course, to people who have enough money that they are constantly "upgrading." I understand that a lot of people have to move a lot, and not of their own volition. Obviously real estate and property shuffling is not a game to them.