Mom and Dad volunteered to help on the project for two weeks. Excellent, free labour! Next problem: a place to stay. Our little 10x14 cabin isn't really big enough for more than two of us, and has no shower - and ya know, I'm just not all that excited about sleeping in a small room with people who've been doing heavy construction labour all day and didn't have access to a shower!
So we started hunting - they didn't want to have to drive very far, but that meant finding accommodations close by ... which is not as easy as it sounds, as I do live rather far out in the country. Anyway, we did locate a cabin that was rented for $700 a week ... pretty steep, but it had two bathrooms, two bedrooms, a shower, and was 10 minutes away. I checked it out quickly the day I signed the agreement and all seemed well.
Yeah, until we moved in. Nothing was clean (despite the promise that it'd be all cleaned up for us ... I know people have differing definitions of "clean" but really, you should be able to expect that you could eat off the dishes without seeing grime around the edges, eww). Mom scrubbed the stuff we'd need to use and we figured we'd make do. I was violently allergic to something in that house, so I slept at my little cabin, and Mom (surprisingly) was okay. Apparently whatever mold was in the cabin was different than the stuff she's allergic to, so she was doing all right.
By the second night, it had been revealed that the shower was pretty disgusting - water backed up out of the drain up to your ankles and that's just nasty. The day that we poured concrete into the foundation, the shower stopped working. No water came out of the taps. We had people who'd worked all day in concrete, with no shower. NOT GOOD.
Phone calls to the man who rented it (now known as Cabin Idiot) were not particularly helpful. "Oh, you musta turned somethin' off ... go check this ... okay, try that ... ah, don' worry 'bout it, there'll be water in the morning I guarantee it". Yeah, well, there wasn't. We packed up and moved everyone to the Ramada Hotel where we had a kitchenette, a hot tub, a swimming pool, and maid service, for under $80 a night. Okay, so there was a 40 minute commute, but you know, for a hot tub and maid service it's worth it.
Especially since Mom broke her foot a couple of days later.
She was burning junk in the firepit, it flared up a bit and she backed up ... and stepped on a twig, rolled her foot, and broke a bone in it. Take home message here: drink your milk when you are young, and wear work boots if you have fragile bones! Anyway, she was much happier spending her remaining week in the hotel with internet access and full cable than she would've been in that crummy little place.
