When It Rains, It Pours...

...and causes your aging roof to leak, and leaves a big, brown spot on your ceiling, and a few days later your savings account is a few thousand dollars lighter and you find yourself in the middle of your kitchen experiencing a full-blown nervous meltdown.

Really? That's not how that saying goes? It's just me? Huh.

Did we know our roof was in bad shape? Yep. Even before last September's freaky inland hurricane, we needed to replace it. It was on that list every home owner has of Big Things That Need To Be Done, But That We're Just Going To Keep Putting Off Because We Like To Live On The Edge.

Should we have gotten it replaced this spring or summer? Absolutely. I went so far as to get quotes on a new roof, even. But then we had a large unexpected expense (that hit after we had already paid for our summer vacation in full, natch) that made us decide to wait just one more year.

Mother nature had other plans. Do you know what a week of heavy rain does to a damaged roof? You could take a Rorschach test from our entryway ceiling.

The gremlins that inhabit our house decided they wanted to come out and play in the rain, too. No sooner had the roof been installed (and it looks truly lovely, by the way) than our dishwasher started tripping the GFCI outlet in the kitchen. After pulling it out, we discovered that the old dishwasher (it was old when we moved into the house 8 years ago) had been leaking slowly for a while, and the puddle under the unit was close enough to all the electrical stuff that that was what was tripping the GFCI this week. It's so old, we're not going to kid ourselves about the value of repair versus replacement.

Add these things on top of the stress I've been feeling over my knee, which is taking a long time to get pain-free and down to a normal size, and the strain of a delayed repaving project right in front of our house that has kept us out of our driveway and parking ten houses up the street for going on three weeks now (the geniuses decided to rip up the old asphalt the day before a forecasted 10-day-long wet spell and couldn't pour concrete into the rain-filled trench left behind until yesterday), and the fact that we were told this summer by a repairman that the condenser in the fridge is dying and we'll need a new fridge within 6 months, and I had a wee bit of a nervous breakdown Monday night.

It started as mild tears over the kitchen sink. You know how sometimes you just need a good, cleansing sobfest? It was that at first.

"You know we're going to be fine, right?" my steadfast, uber-calm husband said. Then he started detailing all the financial steps he was going to take to make sure we could get over this rough patch.

For some reason, that just launched me into a full-fledged anxiety attack complete with nausea, uncontrollable crying that left me breathless, and a general inability to get my fool self under control.

I started looking around at all the other things that could go wrong. It's been 4-years since we put a 4-year stain and seal on the deck, and the wood is looking dangerously worn, so we have to tackle that. Even if we do it ourselves like we have in the past (and swore we'd never do again) it's expensive. I have wanted to replace the nasty, yellowed flooring in our master bath ever since we moved in 8 years ago. Now that the roof and gutters look so pretty and new, it highlights our faded shutters that we painted the first year in the house but that have cracked from being in direct sunlight most of the day and need to be replaced. Suddenly, the new dimensional shingles on the roof looked to be overlapping Benjamins instead.

Home ownership is overwhelming. Why does so much go so wrong all at once?

Jason shooed me out of the kitchen to go hit the showers and calm down, and a martinti and Sunday night's recorded Mad Men brought me back to the land of the semi-sane. But as soon as I leave school today, I have to go shopping for a new dishwasher. I am getting the hives just thinking about it.

The Money Pit just keeps getting deeper.