The sky is falling! Well, the ceiling, anyway…

So this happened last night.

Cute, right?  I know things have been going too well around here lately.  The ceiling must have been feeling ignored.  Poor ceiling. Clearly it has been under a lot of pressure…I was just not aware.   Everyone has a breaking point, right?

The real reason is because I had my house appraised recently and was feeling pretty good about its estimated market value.  My plan is to live in this house while the kids still live with me, and then when they have lives of their own and aren’t that interested in hanging out with me anymore, I’ll sell up and downsize, and be able to own a nice little apartment.  The appraisal meant that plan was realistic.  Smug.  Yep, I was smug.

So the house had to fight back, right?

It did so relatively quietly. As ceiling collapses go, it was almost stealthy.  I was doing the dishes and I heard this crashing noise.  I have a drying rack in my laundry where, surprisingly enough, I hang wet laundry to dry.  I have to remember to keep the laundry door closed when I’m drying washing, because all of these dangly things are often irresistible to my big fat Siamese cat.  He often under or over estimates his pounce and brings the whole lot down on top of himself.

Forgetting stuff and me are on pretty intimate terms, so I heard that crash and thought it was clean, damp laundry, hitting my quiet dirty laundry floor, thanks to my beloved cat.

Crap! That means washing the lot again! Crap, crap, crap!  I’ll kill that little…ooooh! Shiny thing.

And that was that.

But it wasn’t the damp laundry being stalked and attacked by my cat.  It was the ceiling succumbing to the weight of the world.  Or the weight of something!

When I did my nightly door check (I have been known to forget to close my garage doors.  There’s that ‘forgetting’ thing again) I suddenly noticed half my ceiling hanging down in the garage.

Oooops.  Pretty sure that’s not supposed to happen.

I swore. Loudly.  I have PMS right now.  So I swore a lot, in fact.

Kids come running, so they can tell me off about swearing.  Cos I’m always telling them not to swear. Teenagers.  You know how smart they are.

They see the ceiling and kinda panic.

What caused that?  Was there animal in the ceiling? OMG!  Was there a person in the ceiling? There’s a person in the ceiling! It’s like that episode of CSI where there’s some creepy guy living in the ceiling, watching the woman living there, and videoing her naked!

This is my anxiety ridden teenagers talking now.  I’m thinking ‘If there’s some pervert living in my ceiling he really picked the wrong house. Nothing to see here…’

So you have to remember that my son is on the Autism spectrum.  Asperger’s. And suffers from very high anxiety.  He starts thinking it through and analysing every possible cause of why a ceiling would suddenly collapse.  NOT including for absolutely no reason at all.  In fact, he skipped right over the real reason the ceiling caved in – shit happens.  That’s it.  No more analysis required.

My daughter on the other hand couldn’t sleep.  She’s terrified that all the ceilings, in every room in the house are now all going to start falling in.   Can’t say I blame her. The thought had crossed my mind.  I let it keep crossing and go on its way. I don’t like that thought.  It’s fairly ridiculous, anyway.

I explained to her that the ceiling in the garage is different to the rest of the house. They construct garages differently (even though it’s under the roofline of the house) because, well, it’s a garage.

She accepted that for a while.  But it was a long night.

I called the insurance company this morning, who told me a builder would be out to assess the damage today.  That was at 8am this morning.  I haven’t heard a thing yet.  It’s 12:30pm.

He has until 3pm before I’m back on the phone to the insurance company asking where they heck he is, because I don’t want to spend another sleepless night reassuring my rather highly strung daughter that the ceiling will not fall.  (Chicken Little, anyone?).  I want to be able to explain to her that the ceiling has been assessed, has been deemed safe, and no more anything will be falling anyplace!

But I can’t do that if this builder guy doesn’t show up.  My claim was considered an emergency case.  Ceilings falling in aren’t generally good for the health of the occupants of a home.  I would have thought ‘emergency’ would have meant ‘drop what you’re doing and come here now.’  Clearly his definition of ‘emergency’ is different to mine.

I’m pretty sure it’s safe.  But ‘pretty sure’ doesn’t always cut it.

He’s got two and a half hours.  Then he’s getting a phone call. The insurance company told me his name.  He can run, but he can’t hide.  And remember the part where I said I have PMS?

Let’s all hope he calls soon.