Mold, mold, mold

When Sears delivered our washer/dryer unit back in September, they ripped our linoleum. It's taken until now to get to the point where we could turn in an estimate to them. Yesterday a guy came out to look at the floor, and--to make a long story short--he/we discovered that an old toilet (removed before we bought the house) had caused water damage to previous flooring that had subsequently been simply covered up by multiple layers of flooring and linoleum. So yesterday, Josh spent a good six hours ripping up four wet layers of floor and scrubbing what was about 1/4 inch of black mold from the original wood floor. SO GROSS! I'm not allowed in the house, but I've seen pictures and they're not pretty. I'll post some when our lives are put back together. We're staying with my generous and gracious hosts of parents in the meantime.

After Josh finishes pulling up the remainder of the flooring today (the edges are tricky with all the nails) and scrubbing the wood floor about a million more times, then letting it get really dry, a plumber will have to come out to move our old clawfoot bathtub (in addition to all the other bathroom appliances) so that Josh can rip the floor out under that. But the pipes to the bathtub and sink are so old, there is a good chance they will break when those two items are moved, so we'll likely end up replacing them with new plastic ones. Then we are going to put tile down.

But, surprisingly, I'm not freaking out. I don't know why. In fact, I'm feeling grateful for the following things:

1. That Sears ripped the linoleum in the first place so that we could find out about a problem that, left unfixed, could have posed a health hazard to the baby and eventually rotted our floor to the point that our heavy tub could have fallen through it! (The plumber's words.)

2. Even though this is going to cost more than just putting down linoleum would have, we're saving a lot on the total cost by Josh doing all of this horrible clean-up himself, and the Sears payment will cover a lot of the tile install.

3. We've been referred to a great plumber who is nearly retired and therefore has lots of experience working with houses and appliances the age of ours (i.e. 100 years old).

4. Our pipes are super easy to get to--they're all exposed in the basement and won't be much trouble to replace. And if a couple break, that's two pipes we should be replacing eventually anyway. Plus, we'll have better water flow in our bathroom.

5. We will have tile in our bathroom!

6. The bathroom will no longer have that faint, but strange, odor I can never get rid of.

7. We now know we have nice wood floors under our carpet, should we ever chose to restore them.

8. This happened before we got carpets cleaned in the rest of the house and before we deep cleaned or put any furniture in the baby's room.

9. The water in our bathroom sink had been of lower volume than normal. The plumber fixed it (for free) while doing the estimate and also checked all the other pipes in the house and declared them leak-free. We get some water on our basement floor sometimes, and I've been terrified that we have some major leaking problem. Not so.

10. Josh is doing all the work.

Josh is amazing, by the way.