Blessings.

The background:
About a month ago, our dishwasher started making noises. Alex's attempts to fix it failed, and providentially, my parents bought a new dishwasher and agreed to let us take their old, perfectly good one. So we brought it home and installed it the next day. I merrily washed the dishes for a month.

The realization:
This past Tuesday at around 4 PM, I ran the dishwasher because our social worker was coming to update our home study. The next morning, we come downstairs at 6:45 am and there is a small shallow puddle of water that has steadily made its way across half the kitchen floor overnight. We're rather surprised by this. Alex turns off the water and spends the 2 hours before work cleaning up since I had to leave for work immediately. Just to make sure the worst is not happening, he climbs into the crawl space to see that the worst has indeed occurred. The leak permeated and there is water present.the worst has happened. Let the games begin!

The aftermath:
1/3 of our kitchen floor is pulled up down to the 1 inch plywood sub floor. The dishwasher is in the living room. The oven is blocking the laundry room. The dining room table and 6 chairs are now blocking part of the pantry, and there is a large pile of nasty not missed-going-to-be-missed vinyl on the floor that we must step on to get anywhere else in the house. Dust is everywhere. The carpet is nearly ruined now (smile!) and several large heaters are running on the floor and in the crawl space. But we are not discouraged. We dont have time to be discouraged, and this isn't something to be discouraged about.

The Blessings:
Alex and I have had good "shoulder to shoulder" time, working along side of each other to accomplish the restoration of our kitchen floor. Any damage is in the hundreds, not thousands of dollars, and the kitchen did not flood- it was merely a prolonged leak, which thankfully the Lord allowed us to catch before things got BAD and exspensive. Alex is handy, and I am a willing helper. Personally, I've enjoyed the time spent working on the kitchen together.

And as a secondary, material blessing, we were planning to distch the floor anyway, and put in some amazingly cool, but long term temproary laminate. If our schedule hadnt been derailed several weeks ago, we'd have put it in, and the floor would have been ruined. Now we are forced to make all the changes we were going to do: paint, counter top, floor. We're just starting earlier than normal. And I dont have to look at that ugly vinyl anymore! Happy Happy Day!

The only downside so far? The entire house is a disaster. More so than normal. But I can deal with that.