What happens to your home when you combine insulating the attic and basement crawl space, plus Christmas, plus cold and flu season, plus the recent delivery of a stove, plus a foot of snow? You get one very stressed mom who is worried that her living room is going to be featured on the next episode of Hoarders.
It started out innocently enough, a plan to tighten up and insulate our home to save energy and our monthly heating expense. Our house is so leaky that we might as well just open up a window and drop the dollars out onto the lawn. or wait, in some cases, we don’t even need to open a window to do that. Some of them slide down all by themselves.
The plan was to start with the crawl space and then load items from the attic into it, freeing the attic space to empty so that could be insulated. But then the plan changed to switching out the oil tank. So now, the attic contents are filling the living room instead.
Add to this the fact that because of the contractor’s scheduling issues and a household full of colds, and the one day temporary measure has turned into almost a week. To this, mix in a Toyland town of Christmas presents and a winter storm that is keeping not only our kids indoors but also the neighbor kids indoors in our house. All of these kids decide that it is cool to add to the chaos by building tents. Oh, and did I mention the large cardboard box that came with our new stove? The kids won’t let us throw it out even though it has been jumped on so many times that it is flat and dented on one side.
Me, I’m hiding in the family room where my little corner of an office exists. It is a nice place. There is also a TV, and I can sneak out to the bathroom if necessary. I can look out at the peaceful scene of the white snow against the pines in the woods.
Every few hours, some of the hoard washes up on the edge of the room, but I keep shoveling it back. I’m wondering if sandbags would help, but then I remember that my husband is also cleaning out the garage today. The inner door to the garage leads directly into the family room.