Our little house is full of its own personality and quirks. And for the most part we love them. The door into the garage doesn't hang right, the screen door doesn't close, unless you slam it shut, as if you were in such a temper, the light switch in the bedroom has to be on or the lights in the office and the guest bedroom won't work, and so on. Mostly we smile lovingly at them and sometimes mutter a cross word under our breath when the light switch gets turned off. Mostly we look at them as George Bailey does his knob on his banister (after he comes back from never-being born, of course). We look at it that way because it is ours. The house is ours. The light switch is ours. The lamp on the ceiling which doesn't work because we pulled the string on it right off. They all are ours. (Or God's, I should say, since everything belongs to Him).
However, sometimes we live in blissful ignorance of what is happening to our little house. I suppose I shouldn't say in blissful ignorance, because we weren't ignorant exactly, but maybe we were a little too blissful.
A few months ago, (it was so long ago, we aren't even sure exactly when it started), we noticed that the floor in the bathroom was damp. Alright, it wasn't damp - it was wet. This didn't strike too much fear in us, because, of course, we always get water on the floor when we get in and out of the shower or splash in the bathtub. It just seems to be one of the things that us Porters do quite well - get water on the floor. So for the first little while we didn't think anything of it. Finally, I realized that there was water puddled all over our bathroom floor. I thought that if I put some towels on it and mopped it up it would solve the problem. So I did. However, when I checked the towels later, they were sopping. Completely sopping. I tried again. The more towels I put on, the more wet they seemed to be. I soon realized that we had a problem. For several days, perhaps weeks (as I said, our timeline on when it all happened and how long it took is a bit foggy, perhaps it is waterlogged.......Alright, bad joke) the water remained there until we decided to so something about it. And, as always, whenever we have a problem with our house, we call my dear father-in-law.
Father-in-law came along, and he and Luke dutifully went to work to figure out what it was. My father-in-law thought it was the toilet. So the toilet was fixed and the floor was torn up. We were left with instructions to let the sub floor dry out and then we could put a new floor in (a bit of a dilemma when you have no money, but that is irrelevant at the moment). Excited that the problem was finally in hand, we dutifully waited for the few days. We watched each day as it got dry, and then we watched each day as it returned to being a pond. Perhaps we could have imported some fish and let them swim around in it, and perhaps, we should have gotten some water lilies and tried to be reminiscent of a Monet. But we didn't. We let it become a little pond. We told the father-in-law that it was not drying, and indeed, more water was coming in, but that was all we did. We simply left our not-quite-Monet pond on the bathroom floor. For a few months. Oh, it wasn't always pond-like. It would go in spurts of being very dry - and then it would be very wet. And then it would be wet, and then dry. It did so in random succession, with no apparent cause. Nothing we seemed to do in the bathroom seemed to have any affect on when it was dry or when it was wet. So we simply lived with our sometimes dry/mostly wet bathroom quite nicely for a few months. Every once in awhile we would reference getting it fixed or seeing if the father-in-law could come and fix it, but mostly we contently went on our way. It didn't bother us that we only had a wet sub floor. It became one of the quirks of our little house. It caused occasional annoyance, and mostly placid ignoring.
However, today, Luke was at my parent's house where a friend from church was working on fixing a few things there. Apparently our bathroom came up, because said friend came over determined to look at our bathroom and fix it. I can't tell you the outcome, as Luke and he are still busily working trying to find out where that trying leak is coming from.
But, as the friend was working, he pulled off a lot of rotting drywall and such, he said "Look, there are mushrooms growing in the wall."
Sure enough, there were mushrooms growing in the wall.
There is also mold in our crawlspace.
The moral of this tale, which I don't entirely know the outcome, seems to me to be clear.
Lesson I'm not sure what number is: It is a good thing to be content, but sometimes it is also good to be a little more proactive and not let water sit around your house so that mushrooms grow in your walls.
