SAGA OF A CEILING

A complete history of our kitchen ceiling would begin long before we lived here, and would probably include many twists and turns which we know not of. We can only guess at its probable sordid past. It may have borne witness to scandal and intrigue that time has forgotten.

When we moved in two years ago, the ceiling was a poorly installed layer of something cheap and synthetic that was meant to look like wide planks and succeeded only in looking unprofessional. It also supported a light fixture that resembled a canoe. We removed the canoe and my father painted the ceiling, and while it didn't look perfect (you could still make out the outline where the light had been) it looked fine enough.

At this point the saga moves upstairs. For a while during our first year in the house, the shower preferred not to provide hot water, and had to be coerced every time, with the faucet handle cranked up as far as it could possibly go. One day Mark, in a desperate attempt to bully the faucet into working, cranked the handle just past its breaking point and, in a fit of superhuman strength, yanked the whole apparatus clean out of the wall.

The water did not stop flowing, and there was then no handle with which to turn it off. Somehow the water was now coming not only out of the faucet, but also out of the pipes inside the wall, and therefore trickling down into the inner workings of the house.

And eventually, down into the kitchen below. While I stayed upstairs and tried to divert the water out of the wall, Mark was down in the kitchen, where the ceiling had sprung a leak. He quickly ran out of buckets with which to catch the drips and was using pots and pans and mixing bowls and anything else that would hold water. (Did I mention that our wood counters were newly installed and had not yet been waterproofed?) In his spare moments he searched in the basement for the place to shut off all water in the house, and couldn't find it.

I was stuck sitting in the bathroom holding a cut-off piece of a plastic bottle, with which I was able to redirect about half of the water from the pipe in the wall into the tub; the rest was fueling Mark's panic below as our kitchen became increasingly waterlogged. Finally a plumber arrived in response to a frantic phone call, and he, with his plumberly insight, found the place to shut off the water almost immediately.

After he'd installed a new handle on the shower faucet and gone, we started to wonder if there wasn't a pool of water still lurking inside the kitchen ceiling. While a ceiling full of holes wasn't an appealing idea, the thought of the things that might begin to grow out of sight in the dampness appealed to us even less. Mark drilled into various parts of the ceiling and released even more fountains of water into the strategically placed pots and pans. Eventually we were convinced that we'd evicted the worst of it, and we put up fans to dry out the rest.

For over a year the ceiling looked like someone had attacked it with a few rounds of buckshot, which is good fodder for tales of a fictional kitchen showdown, but not the look we were going for. Until now. Now, finally and at long last, there is a very smooth, very beautiful, altogether unremarkable new ceiling in our kitchen. I would not formerly have suspected how much deep satisfaction this would bring. After all, who comes into a kitchen and looks up? No one besides us will notice it at all, which is how it ought to be with a ceiling.

The man who installed this shimmering masterpiece did the work while we were out of the country, so we returned after two weeks away to find all evidence of past escapades completely erased. As far as anyone can tell, the kitchen ceiling has been a bland wasteland all its life. The ghost of the canoe is gone and the holes exist no more.

And those were souvenirs we were glad to be rid of.