So we're starting work on the house again! (Hooray! A house blog without house projects is like a fish without a bicyc --errmmm... waitaminnit!) We're finishing the tile on our bathroom, and erecting a wall that hides our washer/dryer. That wall will become a closet. The guys are in the house for the first day, and boy have I forgotten how much I hate having people in the house. Noisy people in the house. Noisy people with hammers and saws and drills and all kinds of stuff. The first day is the worst, as they have to undo some of the construction that we did nearly two years ago-- the cement for the shower was done wrong with a too small drain, and so they had to take up all that cement, and undo the drain and then redo it, laying down a vinyl something or other to make sure that the water doesn't go anywhere, and if it does, it doesn't do any harm. The reason that it's the worst is that I'm spending money to discover that I already spent money that I didn't need to have spent. As the kid from Avenue Q says, "It sucks to be me." Whenever somebody works on the house, I'm afraid that I'll find out about some new thing that didn't work, or gets broken in the process, or that wasn't installed properly to start, or that has been risking death's door since we got here. It's easy for the mind to go crazy about everything-- there's so much going on in a house, and although it seems very fragile, it's a pretty robust entity. Nevertheless, it's a delicately balanced entity. The moment the drain doesn't work upstairs means that we might have to rip up the ceiling downstairs. (etc., etc.) This should be a shorter process, assuming we survive it, and that enlarging the drain doesn't somehow make the house fall down.