Bad Luck Wednesdays...

That's what Andre calls Wednesdays (or Tuesdays, or Thursdays) when everything seems to go wrong. Today is one of those days.

Today was a slow day at work to begin with. It was to start with an 11am chiropractic appointment in the hopes of ridding my brain of the awful headaches I've been having since Wednesday. Then was to continue with four appointments at work. Three of my four appointments cancelled. This left me with a 6pm appointment and my adjustment.

11am I get a call from the clinic. "Jenna are you coming for your appointment?"
me: "Umm, it's not until 11:30"
clinic: "No, it's right now, 11:00"
me: "Shhhhhiiiiiit. There's no way I can make it"

I hung up the phone and the frustration of the pain that I have been experiencing got the best of me and I burst into tears. I just couldn't take it anymore. Thank goodness I still have some bootlegged Aleve to get me through the pain.

Fast forward to 3:30 this afternoon. Andre calls me from work. Due to Air Canada discontinuing their "Jazz" flights his job is changing and his hours are being cut. He will also be working every Sunday just to get more hours in. We've been working so hard to pay off our debt, so hard to put the money into savings for a down payment on a house and now this.

It's like the universe is just laughing at us. "Ha ha, sucks to be you!" The rational part of my brain knows that everything will work out. Hell we've made it through worse than this! But it's still frustrating.

Here's hoping tomorrow will be a good luck Thursday!

And the verdict...

Is that the shower is still a giant piece of shit! Even after waiting until after 6pm I watched with horror as water started leaking out of the seams of the shower as Andre bathed the filth of camping off his body.

I couldn't believe it! After all that work, all that waiting, all that mess! So we went up and told them that the shower was leaking. Her answer after I showed her all the seams that were leaking? "Well it did take us two years to fix your fridge! Ha ha ha!" (I am seething in the bathroom sopping up water as I hear this exchange) Andre says "I hope that doesn't mean that it's going to take you that long to fix the shower."

Who the hell says something like that?! Are they on crack? Do they just not care? The moral of this whole scenerio is that you should never, ever rent an apartment from a someone from your church. They will still screw you over, but your Christian guilt will keep you from telling them they're fucking idiots.

So after getting all the water cleaned up from our shower we went out to dinner (yummy Lebonese food!) and I drowned my stress in 3 glasses of wine with dinner. We came home and they told us they had added some more caulking (the plumber had said you didn't need any?!WTF?). I checked the shower and it is the worst caulking job I have ever seen in my life. It's going to drive me crazy every time I shower and scrub it clean.

Bathroom Reno

Despite my pessimism the bathroom was actually 90% complete when we got home from the camping trip. The shower was up and we just had to wait for the silicon to continue sitting for a few more hours and we will be able to test it out at 6pm tonight. As long as there are no leaks we will be able to use it as we normally would as soon as I clean out the bottom. (all I have to say is dirty work boots in the bottom of a wet shower=ewwww)

So when we left there were a bunch of damp towels on the floor controlling the leak in the shower:

It was not pleasant.

So we called my mother who was checking in on the cat to see what the progress was on the shower when she came in for the cat, so we had some sort of idea what to expect. She was great, she even did our dishes that we didn't have time to get done before we left!

Nothing prepared us for the disgusting mess that awaited us when we walked in the door. The owner was in the back doing lord only knows and as soon as we walked in (probably with looks of horror) she said "you aren't suppose to be home yet!" Now when we left the apartment it was clean. Dirty dishes piled neatly by the sink. Counter and stove wiped and clean. Dining room table cleaned off with only a note for my mom. Not so much when we returned home.

Apparently while we had been gone the fridge leaked three times for the owner. Not a new thing. Another thing that's been leaking forever, and her solution again was to shove a towel under the crisper (nothing like a moldy towel under your produce!). So while the plumber was there he looked at it and fixed it. So after he had done this, she had taken our crisper out along with the bottom shelf. All the contents were on our counter and stove top. EVERYTHING. Our wine rack and wine that was on the fridge, my mixing bowls and little odds and ends that were on the fridge when we left? On the counter! Everything was scattered everywhere. It was horrible mess. There was stuff everywhere. Her answer for everything being everywhere? "I just didn't want to put it back"

For the love of all things good in this world, it took all I had not to strangle her! So in addition to having to unpack all of our camping gear and food, I had to clean up her mess. Then after it's all away Andre asks: "Jenna don't you feel relaxed since we've been camping?" I just had to look at him. Are men clueless all the time?!

The only problem with the new shower is the damage that we are left with to the drywall, and the new storage unit. I now have this wire thing that I'm suppose to store all of our hand towels and toiletries in. Now, in the picture it looks okay, but I'm not the kind of girl that likes open storage. I don't like everyone knowing what I keep in my bathroom. Now to maintain my sanity we will have to make a trip to Ikea to find some sort of storage box that I can use in here. Hopefully we will have enough room for everything otherwise I will have to buy more wire boxes that you can apparently buy at Canadian Tire. Yeah, that's really what I want to be spending my money on right now...

The other problem with the bathroom reno are all the tears to the drywall and my beautiful paint! Now as you can probably gather from my almost weekly vents about the owners of our apartment are that they are not the most prompt at fixing up things around here. Now I'm wondering how long it will take them to patch up these rips so that they can be painted over. Something that will be left up to us, because they left all the painting up to us when we moved in. Not that I minded, because then we were able to pick our own colours, but I really hate the idea of having to repaint a bathroom that didn't need to be repainted in the first place.

Camping at Valens

This year we finally had a summer, and with summer means camping! We didn't get to do much with all the wedding hoopla last summer. Andre's favourite camp site is Valens Conservation Area. Not too far from home, clean bathrooms, the sites themselves are nice, but we've been going there almost every summer for the past 5 years. I wanted a change, but Andre didn't. So off to Valens we went.

We almost didn't go though. The weather was suppose to rain (60% POP) with scattered thunderstorms, but we went mainly because we didn't want to be home with all the chaos with the bathroom reno going on. So we made sure to pack some extra tarps for cover, had our friends and family cross their fingers and do a sunshine dance and we were off.

Aside from thunder rumbling for the entire day on Saturday, and two little rainshowers on Saturdaymorning, the weather wasn't too bad. The sky got very dark while we were hiking Saturday afternoon and I was worried we would have a downpour, but we managed to miss the terrible thunderstorm complete with hail and funnel clouds that hit Hamilton that same afternoon.

What was very unusual for us was the fact that we only snapped a few pictures the entire weekend! I don't know whether we were so exhausted from the week and stress of the bathroom, but we only got some pictures from our campfire Saturday night. This is some of our documentation of our camping trip: (we didn't even get one of the two of us!)

The saga continues...

I feel like lately all I use this blog for is to vent about whatever chaos is going on with our apartment. So why stop now?!

I can't remember whether I have mentioned the bathroom before. Well since we moved in just over 2 years ago the bathroom has leaked. Literally the day we moved in, we walked into the bathroom and there was a huge puddle on the floor. The owners response: "yeah, it's done that since we had it installed. Just put some towels on the floor to collect the water till we have it fixed." They never did have it fixed, but we (yes you're reading correctly we had a friend of mine come in and re-caulk the shower and that seemed to do the trick until about two weeks ago.

So after a few talks with the owners and them hmmming and ahhhing over what the hell they were going to do they have finally decided that they're going to replace the shower while we're away camping this weekend. She came down this morning to measure the shower stall and explain what they're doing (I don't even think they know what they're doing). Thankfully they have a plumber (their granddaughters boyfriend) coming over to do the work for them.

I will have to post some before during and after pictures once it's all done. In the meantime though this will mean that we will not have a shower (lord, give me strength!) and will have to use the owners shower upstairs. I so hate having an audience when I have to shower but we'll have to deal with it until it's all finished.

I hope I don't have too many breakdowns in the process. With all the repairs that have needed to be done in the last little while, and having no control over what's happening I haven't been the easiest person to deal with.