Nothing tragic, nothing tragic…but we did have a run in (quite literally) with a port-o-potty truck in our alley yesterday. One of our neighbors in the alley that run beside our house had a party on Wednesday night. Apparently they also had a port-o-potty for their guests to use (ick!) and they had it picked up yesterday.
As I was sitting in my office and working, I heard a bang on the side of the house. So I peaked out the window next to me and saw the port-o-potty truck in the alley which had apparently just struck our house. Lovely. The problem resulted because one of our other neighbors was parked in the alley and the truck barely had enough room to pass between our house and this car. So he accidentally bumped into the corner of the house and knocked some paint off the edge of the wall. From the sound of it, I thought he may have done some real damage. But thankfully he must have just been inching down the alley anyway because the house didn’t move or anything. In fact, if I hadn’t been sitting almost next to where he ran into the wall, I may not have even heard it.
After inspecting the damage, we decided not to call the police even though the driver technically should have left his information or at the very least rung the doorbell to apologize and leave his information. I do have his license plate number, though, and I’m fairly certain our neighbors would give us the name of the company even though we’ve never met them…but the driver would loose his license for a year, have a huge fine and who knows what else…so we figure that for a scratch on the wall which we need to repaint anyway, we won’t hassle him or the cops – which would likely be an even bigger hassle for us.
If you look closely (click on the photo to make it bigger) you will see that there is a bit of texture and paint missing on the corner and it shows up white. This is what we’re talking about here. Not major.
But speaking of damage…
When Stefan’s family was here last weekend, something happened that I had almost chosen not to write about…but, well, we have a gash in the wall now which we see multiple times daily so I might as well elaborate. We were getting everything ready for dinner and Stefan and his father were outside with the grill. I was making salad and various other sides to go with the steaks and had stepped into the mud room because Stefan’s mom had asked me about place mats. As I was looking through the table settings box out there, I heard a loud crash and my first reaction was, “Oh no, what has Ayla done now?!” Now that wasn’t really fair to her because she was very well behaved while they were here…but that’s also usually when she sneaks up and does something bad anyway.
But when I came out of the mud room, I saw our old large glass mirror laying down on the stairs between the kitchen and main house and Stefan’s grandmother was on the floor next to it. Talk about complete panic. She’s 80 years old and although she’s quite fit, the mirror is very heavy and having it fall on someone could be terrible. This is the mirror below and this is how it was sitting before, just sort of propped against the wall. I want to move the mirror upstairs to the landing but that won’t happen on my own…and I have not yet convinced Stefan it is an urgent request but maybe we will get it moved before the housewarming so a child or someone else doesn’t end up under it.
So the mirror fell straight forward and hit this wall. Stefan was actually really bummed out because there were scuff marks here earlier in the day from something else and he had just touched up the wall, hoping to make everything look perfect for the visit with the family.
If you look closely you can see the slight indentation it made on the wall but for the most part it just scuffed it. Definitely not a huge thing and we already had other things that need to be filled anyway.
I think in the end Stefan’s grandmother may have been even more embarrassed than us if that’s possible. We felt so terrible about what happened but thankfully she wasn’t hurt and didn’t even have any pain the next morning. Oh, and did I mention that the mirror didn’t break either? Talk about good fortune!
