This week we’ve had a bunch of guys from Bodine Construction Services here working on our crawl space drainage. Normally I wouldn’t get fussed about water in the crawl space, as long as it dries out; but during the extremely wet period of March in which we all turned into amphibians… –as I was saying, back in March I noticed some water seeping through the garage, apparently from the crawl space. That’s when we called Bodine.

Anyway, Monday through Wednesday, Ian stayed home and babysat the house while I took Benji away to do things outside the house. I figured it’d be too darn frustrating for him to watch guys going into the crawl space and not be able to join them. Plus, I worried about the noise interfering with nap time. On those days, Benji and I saw the guys arrive just as we left, so we waved bye-bye and zipped off, leaving Ian to deal with everything.

By the way, “everything” wasn’t much — on those three days, they never worked past 2 pm, and stopped working more like lunch time a couple days.

Today, however, Ian looked at me plaintively and said, “I would really like to go to work,” in a pleading voice. Succumbing to his puppy-dog eyes, Benji and I skipped PEPS and stayed home, letting Ian go back to work in the office for a change. This has given us an extraordinary firsthand view of the work, and now I’ve decided that far from being expensive, Bodine’s bid was practically a steal.

Today these guys have spent the whole day in the crawl space (with a couple breaks) moving a pipe and rocks into the trench that was dug earlier in the week. The rock procedure involved a large dump truck of rocks coming (GAAAHHH! Excitement through the roof! A TRUCK with ROCKS! What more could we hope for?!); moving a fencing panel to get access to a crawl space vent; removing one of the vents and first channeling the flexible pipe through (presumably to lay in the trench), then using a big funnel-thing to slowly channel rocks into the crawl space, one wheelbarrow-full at a time. The guys in the crawl space had a little sled they put the rocks on to move them around and distribute them.

Then it started raining this afternoon, which just takes everything to a whole new level of misery. Wow. I can’t imagine how much you’d have to pay me to do this job, and frankly, I’m sure these guys aren’t getting paid that much. I made them a batch of cookies to eat during break, but somehow that seems a little inadequate to the amount of dirtiness and discomfort involved in this job.

All this to say that seeing these guys, imagining their work and envisioning spending a good part of my day, every day, in someone else’s boggy crawl space, digging trenches and moving rocks, has given me a fresh appreciation for my job and life. So grateful for what we’ve got… and that we can pay other people to do our really dirty work.