Call Me Chicken Little

It wasn’t the sky that fell today. It was my dining room ceiling.

Yesterday there were 3 electricians here all day, stringing wire, changing boxes, turning off and on the circuit breakers. All things considered, fairly peaceful. 🙂 I managed my 3:30 pm call without a break in my internet. Today the HVAC team arrived. Four of them in 2 vans. Vadim was the spokesman. I showed him the upstairs, showed him the now-safe drop-down attic stairs, apologized for the stuff in the attic, and showed him the newly pruned section of my garden where the compressor would reside. He asked for more boxes if I had them because they need to move the vast majority of the stuff that was in the attic out of the attic. Of course a lot of that stuff was already boxed up because we’d moved it up there from the 2nd floor.

I found him another 6 boxes and let them box up my books and move boxes down to the room over the dining room. That was my son’s bedroom and my office, and that’s what it will be again. I was working away at my work computer when I heard a loud breaking crashing noise behind me. I turned around and saw a big hole in the ceiling and plaster hanging from the edges of the hole. I was so shaken. I was terrified. I was calling up the stairs “are you alright? are you alright?” as I picked my way out of the dining room and up the stairs.

You might remember from prior pictures that a lot of the floor up there is not there. There are some firmly situated boards, loosely laid boards, and holes. Apparently one of the young workers missed the board, stepped into the hole, and through the ceiling. There are so many blessings given this near disaster. He was wearing long pants. Had he not been, had it been one of the 2 workers in shorts, I’m sure his leg would have been shredded. It was one of the lighter-weight workers, only his leg went through, he didn’t fall but we all had a huge scare. Thank goodness I was “at work”. Had I been on my personal computer some of that plaster would have come down on my head. The falling plaster missed the chandelier. The pieces that hit the monitors were small fragments that hit the frame, and not the screen. There happened to be a cushion on the end of the dining room table although I think the glass there is sufficiently thick that it would not have been damaged. The dining room floor is chipped, but I think that we can fix it without needing to replace the floor boards.

It could have been so much worse. I was very shaken and I can only imagine how the fallee was feeling. One of the other workers came down immediately to sweep it up and clean things. *laughing* I was lucky to get my photos taken he came so quickly!! Of course now I need to have the dining room ceiling repainted and I did that only 2 years ago. 😦 I can think of all sorts of macabre comments to put here but I don’t want to go that direction. *shudder* Anyway, it was quite an exciting morning. I can do without that kind of excitement.