Good News Bad News

I finally did it and painted my kitchen.  It's something it desperately needed, and I've wanted to do since we moved in.  It's a beautiful pale yellow now and I plan on getting some blue curtains, towels, etc to accent with.  It looks so nice and fresh, and not old anymore.  I love it!

As I was painting my last wall (behind the fridge) I noticed a few holes/scratches in the wall that wouldn't hold the paint. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that whenever I pressed the drywall near the holes, a small stream of powder would gush out of the hole, like a pixie stick.  I got a sinking feeling in my stomach and showed Alex.  After some exploration and removing all the plaster off of the areas where the drywall paper was loose, my wall now looks like this.

At first glance it looked like water damage, which would be understandable since we have a drainage problem on that side of the house that we are trying to fix.  Except that the damage fans up, instead of down.    And when you look closely the plaster is riddled with tiny holes.  And then we remembered the ant problem that we had before we started having the pest control guys spray monthly.  And come to think of it, our wall looks just like one of those ant farms you can buy.  Sinking feeling deepens.

Then Alex pulled out the baseboards on both this and the continuation of the wall in the next room (where we had seen ants emerge from before.)  Sure enough both of the baseboards splintered like rotten wood. Now our stomachs are about as low can be and we're imagining an entire wall eaten away by termites or carpenter ants or some other wood destroying organism.  But it's nearly midnight on Saturday, and there's nothing we can really do anymore until we get a professional termite guy in here on Monday to assess the damage.  So we just push the refrigerator back into place and go to bed.

We did look up our insurance policy.  Guess what is NOT covered by homeowners' insurance.

Keep us in your prayers.  We could use some good news about now.