Be Our Guest

Warning - somewhat cranky post ahead. So if you would rather revel in Harris/Walz joy (yay!), then you should skip it!

We love having artists stay with us short-term and have had dozens of them come and stay over the years (on top of the "regular rentals" at the Summit house). From touring casts for shows to designers in for pre-show meetings to visual artists on residency to oh-so-many Fringe artists, we've gotten to know so many wonderful people and made lifelong friendships! Sometimes they stay with us here, or if one or the other of the houses is empty we can offer them a whole house. It's part of our mantra of doing good whenever we can.

So I guess it's maybe just luck that, until now, we've escaped any damage (besides one broken pane of glass in a cabinet 14 years ago that they replaced within 12 hours of mentioning it).

We probably got off on a little bit of the wrong foot with the most recent person. We left a key for them to get settled, and set up a stationary air conditioner for them because it was so warm (even though we warned there was no A/C). They had problems with that after leaving it on too long, so we hauled another heavy one out of storage at Summit and installed it. I stopped by a few days to work, but the person was always asleep, so I did not get a chance to actually meet them.

But then I walked in one night late last week to get some work done while P and B were at circus, only to discover a new bathroom "water feature" in the form of a clogged and overflowing toilet. Rather than work, I cleaned up the mess, thinking "Well, that was gross but at least I got it in time." I closed the 1F windows that were again left open, making a mental note to remind them not to leave them open because of the possibility of theft.

Nope.

Saturday — a two-show circus day — we got a bland text about a leak in the dining room. Yup, you guessed it, the sh*t water had gone through the floor and into the ceiling, where it eventually soaked and damaged the plaster ... and then began dripping on the floor, and the rug, and the art, and the furniture...

We knew we should not use the electricity in that room until everything dried out, and a plumber friend suggested we might need to replace the wax ring and the toilet due to it, and we wanted to be *really* careful about water in the bathroom until then. So all of a sudden, this went from "maybe we can get away with a patch" to a "dry everything out, replace the toilet, replace at least a hunk of the ceiling, repaint" situation — and that does not even address getting the rug cleaned, seeing if there's anything that can be done with the damage on the floor, and ensure that the wet things in the bureau and the water-spattered art are ok. 

But in any case, the place is clearly not habitable until the bathroom is fixed, so we asked the organization sponsoring the artist to help them find another place, which finally happened yesterday.

Today I'm over to clean up and get some work done (oh, and to close the 1F windows still left open). Only to open the dishwasher and find that the notes we left about "The pans/pots and wine glasses and cutting knives are not dishwasher safe" apparently did not compute — maybe it was Opposite Day?

Thanks for letting me vent. There's not much to be done about this besides spend a lot of time and money to fix it (I tried to see if an insurance claim would work but the answer was our deductible is high and it would raise our rates and have us risk being dropped and the insurance company would go after the artist for reparation, so that's a no-go.) I still want to do good for folks as we can, but I guess we need to suss how to recalibrate expectations.

I think I need some kind of summer reset!