2025, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Fingers Crossed

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A month before we closed on our house in Minnesota, the realtor phoned me to let me know the hot tub had sprung a leak, and the current owners were told it wasn’t worth fixing. Did we want them to replace it or remove it? I told her to remove it.

Now that we are three weeks from our move, and four weeks from closing on our North Dakota house, I have become very watchful and worried for anything going wrong here and needing to be fixed or replaced. I had a scare Sunday when I noticed that the dishwasher wasn’t draining, but a quick application of a plunger cleared whatever was plugging it up.

I have to calm myself and tell myself to stop when I start worrying about one of our vehicles breaking down, the plumbing exploding and ruining the drywall, or one of us getting injured or dropping dead. It is stressful enough to move, but we sure don’t need a last minute disaster.

What last minute disasters have you experienced? How do you get yourself to knock it off and stop fretting?

31 thoughts on “Fingers Crossed”

  1. Living in an old old house, I am in a continual state of low-level anxiety. Without too much thought I can think up about a dozen things that could go wrong today or tomorrow. I use the same anxiety-quelching thought process that I do when flying. “Whatever is going to happen will happen whether I worry about it or not so why make myself miserable.” Works pretty well!

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  2. Ha! I woke up at 4:40 am MT this morning to check if the post had published. It hadn’t, and when I tried to edit it I saw that VS was already editing it! Talk about last minute disasters! Thanks, VS!

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  3. When YA was three, I had a site inspection to Paris – flight was leaving in the evening. The shower assembly in the bathroom was leaking a bit – this was always a precursor to leaking quite a bit and I worried it would get bad while the dog sitter was there. This assembly was old, badly designed and I had been taking it apart and putting in a new washer ever year or so since I’d owned the house but for some reason that day, it decided that it was done with me. No matter how many times I put it back together, it kept leaking quite badly.

    So if you want to know how much it costs to get a plumber pulled off of a current job to attend to yours, I can tell you!

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  4. Two houses ago, we were preparing our house for sale. I was doing a final clean on a back room in the basement. In that room I had a small office and it also contained the furnace, which was old and should have been replaced, but that was an expense I hoped not to incur. The walls were freshly painted and I had carpeted the floor, mainly to cover some old, possibly asbestos, tile I didn’t want to deal with.

    I was vacuuming the carpet and got the notion I would vacuum out some accumulated soot I had seen in the furnace compartment. As I was doing that, I failed to notice that the soot was so fine it was passing through the vacuum bag and being exhausted from the vacuum and sprayed onto the walls and carpet. This was the evening before the open house.

    Scrubbing the freshly painted white walls could reduce the soot stains to a gray smear but couldn’t eliminate them. The carpet had to be shampooed. I ended up repainting the affected walls, working late into the night.

    We sold the house at the first showing.

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    1. One YA was seven or eight, she thought she would help out by vacuuming the fireplace. It did look good when she was done, but it killed the vacuum cleaner. Even a thorough cleaning and a new filter didn’t help.

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      1. The psychiatrist at our hospital had young daughters who decided to vacuum out the fireplace while the embers were still hot. The vacuum started on fire.

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    2. What a mess that was!

      I had an incompetent cleaning lady for not long because I fired her after finding her assembling the vacuum backwards so she was blowing air out instead of pulling dirt in. I had shown her twice how to use it. Brother.

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  5. Our daughter was in ballet, and when she was in Grade 1, the day before a ballet recital, she decided to give herself short bangs. She was sitting at her desk at school, took out her scissors, an snipped. Her hair was quite long, just perfect for a nice ballet bun. It took a lot of hair spray and styling gel to get those bangs to slick back and stay put.

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  6. Rise and Cope With It All, Baboons,

    There have been several. Days after we moved to a townhouse, I tested the dryer. It was empty, thank goodness, because the previous owners never cleaned the lint trap and the whole thing caught on fire.

    The other one, not last minute, but still disgusting, was the mouse infestation that led to the remodeling of our kitchen. We arrived home from Arizona in April, 2018 to full mousetraps, including one who died behind the cupboards still attached to the trap.

    I can’t even….I just hate mice.

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  7. Our next door neighbor told us about his brother in law who paid a lot of money for a moose license that he won in the ND Game and Fish lottery a year ago. He shot his moose in the Missouri River bottom lands by Williston, ND. The moose fled into the river and died. He couldn’t pull the moose out by hand, so he had to quickly rent a boat to get the moose carcass out of the river before it went bad, and it cost him an additional $2000 to get the moose to shore. We have some of the moose in our freezer.

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    2. Was he obligated to remove the moose, or did he think it was worth it? I just wonder if there was a tax return with a casualty loss described as “moose removal from river”.

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    3. I’m wondering what kind of boat costs $2000 to rent for what presumably was a very short time. Couldn’t he have pulled it out of the river with his car and a rope?

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  9. We had tickets on the next morning’s train, leaving at 6:49AM, heading for Chicago and connecting to a late night flight to Taiwan that night. The bags were packed, the cat-sitter scheduled to arrive after our departure. It was January. Then, the fan on the furnace failed. It was simply a fuse, but I didn’t check that part, and had the thermostat all switched out, when I had to call the HVAC company to send someone on a Sunday afternoon. The bill came AFTER we returned from Taiwan We paid, and paid, and paid, but the trip was wonderful.

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  10. Preliminary to adding a bathroom in the basement of a previous home, I had broken through the floor to access the cast iron sewer line to the street. I needed to cut into the line to add a floor flange for a toilet and a trap for a shower. The tool that was commonly used then to cut cast iron was a sort of chain and ratchet device with “cutting” wheels on the chain. The wheels didn’t actually cut, they just concentrated the tightening pressure of the chain on the pipe so that it would crack in a more-or-less clean line. I had wrapped the chain around the sewer pipe and was levering the ratchet when, instead of cutting cleanly, a section of the sewer pipe crushed like an eggshell.

    This, mind you, was the sole sewer line for the entire house. Not to mention it was a Sunday evening.

    Fortunately, I had a spare length of cast iron pipe and the stainless steel and neoprene collars necessary to connect it, but my confidence in the cutting tool had been diminished. To restore the sewer line I needed to cut out the damaged portion and trim the spare pipe to fit and I needed to do it before anyone needed the bathroom.

    I suspect that the reason the sewer line crushed instead of separating was that, being integrated into a pipeline, it couldn’t spread at the cut. Once there was no pressure from adjoining pipe, I was able to make clean cuts on the ends of the broken pipe as well as on the replacement section. The sewer line could be restored and the project put to bed for the night.

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