our apartment is once again flooded with a team of construction workers. as luck would have it, tropical storm nicole (seriously y’all, mother nature is mocking me) strolled up the east coast like an over-priced hooker and unleashed her fury as though she were menstruating.

we have a walk-in closet in our master bedroom that currently has no ceiling. water sat for days on top of the roof of our building, collecting all sorts of disgusting i don’t know what, and then made it’s way through our ceiling and into our closet.

this has happened twice before, but has obviously never really been fixed. instead, the contracted ceiling dudes just patched up what parts of the ceiling had been damaged.

they put a bandaid on a gaping wound.

so neither of us were surprised when we went into our closet last week to find the mess that we found. and of course no one could get to us until the weekend because there were other jobs around our apartment complex to be done and we needed to wait in line… which meant that the puddle of soaking wet, stagnant water just sat above us, slowly saturating the ceiling.

and this morning, we have this…

our built-ins have transformed into rotting wood, and because there was no original assessment of the damage created by the two previous ceiling soaked situations, we now have this all up in our piece…

the depths of mold. and holy shit is it disgusting… in fact shit may be less disgusting than what is getting scraped out of our ceiling. the smell is absolutely putrid and has given me new perspective when it comes to changing my son’s shit pants.

our guest bedroom has been turned into a closet, which really just means that our clothes are piled on the bed, the dresser, the clothes-drying rack, and wherever we can find open space on the floor. paul’s uniforms are all hanging from the shower curtain rod in jackson’s bathroom. and our bedroom is a dusty mess of sheet rock on the floor and mold above our heads.

an air purifier and dehumidifier were placed in our bedroom in an attempt to clean up the damp air, give us each hacking coughs and chapped lips, as well as bloody noses because it’s as dry as the sahara where we sleep.

we should’ve thought things through a little more thoroughly and slept in the guest room instead of making it our closet. damn.

it was extra super fun this morning when we realized that it had once again rained all night long, and we opened our closet door to find water that had come through the damaged roof and into our closet because WE HAVE NO CEILING yet.

no worries though, one flick of the switch on the dehumidifier from hell and that water was evaporated before i was done brushing my teeth.

insurance adjusters need to come out and assess the damage. (for some reason that makes me laugh maniacally and long to hook up an IV drip to a bottle of grey goose and insert into my floating veins.) once that happens and the insurance adjusters give the contractors the OK to finish defunking our mold situation and then build us a new ceiling, we get to have another team of people come in to take care of that awesomeness.

i am told that all of this should be completed in 3 days. in the meantime, i am going to see how much weight i can gain in the comfort of sesame seed bagels and cream cheese.

did i mention that i am allergic to mold?