Open House, Broken House

From Deb:

Our second Open House was at 1pm today.

During the four days curled up in bed this past week, my two creative children were, happily, all-too-eager to try their hand at making their own (cold, obviously!) breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and entertain themselves with crafts and schoolwork so I could lay around and gaze vacantly at the ceiling. So you can imagine what the house looked like.

Yesterday, feeling much better but with energy still ebbing rather low, I undertook to make it look as it should so that people should not run away screaming as soon as crossed the threshold this afternoon.

I took it slowly. For the first time, I damned whatever impulse had made me buy a 3200 s.f. house. Usually, the spread-out quality of the house means that there really CAN be a place for everything and everything in its place. It seemed to me yesterday, though, that it had morphed into an "every place for everything" house. So it took a while. But I timed myself well, drew up a list of things to accomplish and in what order, and set about it.

At 11:45 this morning, I had precisely an hour's left of work. The girls were actually "helping" at that point -- I had given them Windex and paper towels with the instructions to clean off the various white boards, and mirrors that they could reach.

I was vacuuming the family room when disaster struck.

"Um, Mom," said Ella, whom Madison had sent down to break the bad news, "The door to Madison's closet kind of...got broken."

Note the careful use of the passive voice.

I figured that it had just slid off its track. "I'm sure I can get it back on the track, Ella," I said.

"Well, um, I think the wood kind of...cracked...and there is...well...another piece on the floor."

An hour to go with an hour left to do. I simply didn't have time to figure in a destroyed closet door. As it happened, the girls had abandoned the Windex in favor of one of them careening the other wildly around Madison's room in her desk chair on wheels, and at one point they crashed into the open door. But at that point, I didn't know this and I didn't care how it had happened, I only knew that it hadn't happened without intervention. I am glad that at some point in the distant past I had resolved never to lose control in front of young children, because if this had not been firmly ingrained in every fiber of my being, I would have lost it. I am not beyond getting really ticked off, though (I just never appear to have lost control), and this was one of those times because the kids know that they shouldn't be hanging or yanking on doors. We've had to bend back the hinges on the tv cabinet too many times, and they've heard the lecture. At that point, I imagined that they had been using the closet door as a sliding apparatus such as on playgrounds.

"WHAT!" I brushed past Ella on my way up the stairs. Madison was obviously apprehensive as I rushed into her room. There, indeed, was the offending door, sagging off the track as Ella had described. The bottom left part was still held in place by the metal fitting on the bottom track. But in place of what would have been the upper left-hand corner fitting to the top track was a thick, triangular splinter of wood. As I watched, the metal peg inside it gave way, and the splinter crashed to the floor. The rest of the door sagged forward, threatening to break on the bottom if I didn't remove it immediately, which I did.

I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. The idea of showing the house with a broken left closet door was unthinkable. So I sent the kids out of the room (they were glad to go) and fetched the toolbox. Thank goodness, it was a fairly clean break, so that when I put the bit of door back where it belonged, the front part, at least, didn't have extra bits missing; it just looked like a crack. I was able to get it nailed and screwed together back to the main part of the door, solidly enough to hold its weight on the peg.

I tried to put the door back in place, but I needed a second person to help me fit the peg on the floor into the correct hole in the bottom of the door. So, I drafted a child by shouting sternly down the stairs:

"Whoever it was that did this, and only that person, come on up here!"

Madison appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

"I need your help to fix this."

"But I'm not going to be able to do anything, I'm only a little ki--"

"So help me, Madison, if you whine at me right now, there will be repercussions. I can't even THINK of what repercussions right now, but believe me, they will be bad."

That actually shut her up.

She was able to help me guide the bottom part in place, and then fetch me the hammer and a screwdriver so I could jimmy the top peg back into the mechanism.

And it was done, in 15 minutes. I was able to do the rest of the hour's work in 45 minutes, at a frantic pace. The girls wisely skedaddled and barricaded themselves in the (very clean) family room with Scooby Doo.

Thank goodness I was able to fix it, because I have no idea what I would have done had I not.

Frankly, I don't know whether I would have done it so well had I not been under the stress. Later, when the girls and I were at the Indian restaurant and we were talking about it, I used the episode as an example of the saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention."

They agreed, though, that today, Deb was the mother of invention.