So Sunday afternoon, the new dryer arrived and was placed with very little fanfare. Turns out that if you rip out your cupboard, a door, a door frame and part of the wall that appliances go down into the basement like a hot knife through butter. Much relief and rejoicing was had by all, and Joe and I both sat down there and watched laundry go around like it was the new James Bond. Thrilling, I tell you. Thrilling. Our neighbour came over and helped Joe put our kitchen cupboards back on that side and today I’m taking an unreasonable amount of delight in putting all my things back in, or at least… I was, until the plumber I called to deal with a tiny little leak that was just making a noise and wasn’t even causing any damage, dropped the bomb.

The bomb is that my “soil stack” is “20th century plumbing”. It’s a big cast iron pipe that carries all water and waste from the house, and mine has a big old hole in it just under the only bathroom in our house – up on the second floor, and the rest of it doesn’t look good either. It isn’t properly fixable and must be (IswearIfeelreallywoozyjustthinkingaboutthis) entirely replaced, from the basement to the upstairs. This will, naturally, necessitate ripping up the other side of the kitchen and render us bathroom-less for three days, beginning tomorrow – since it has to be fixed as soon as possible as the fact that a whole lot of water is running down the inside walls of the kitchen without doing visible damage is a problem. Me, I always thought that a leak not doing visible damage was a good thing, but apparently it is a harbinger of the horsemen of the apocalypse, since the water isn’t landing in the basement, but is instead likely damaging not ceilings or walls (which are – despite their cosmetic importance, not important at all – as witnessed by the way that they’re dropping like flies around here) but truly vital and mysterious things like “joists” or “electrical work” or “the support structure of the house”. (That last one ends with my tub falling into the kitchen.. I think.)

All of that makes me feel pretty badly about how long we ignored the funny little water noise… but it’s too late now so I’m letting it go, or at least I’m letting it go until tomorrow morning when they will demolish “a small portion” of the kitchen ceiling and wall and discover what’s what in there. Cross your fingers that the estimate they gave me that caused all the blood to run out of my head is the full extent of the damage. Personally, I bet it is. I mean, you can’t have a wreaked truck, eavestroughs down in a windstorm, a dead washer, a trashed kitchen, sawed up door frame, a wall off, a cracked soil stack AND structural damage…. right? That would be over the top, wouldn’t it? I agree. Bloody unlikely.

We’ll be moving in to Hotel Lovely-Mother-in-Law for a few days (and boy are we lucky to have that option), and for the next little while that we’re pinching pennies to sort out the ransack and ruination of the unexpected pillaging of our post Christmas budget, I have to tell you, I’m being enormously comforted by the stash. I knew it felt right at the time, but now I know that buying this yarn while I could was a tremendously intelligent move.

Let that be a lesson to you. Stashing is just a clever financial insurance policy, and it’s simply fiscally responsible to engage in it.