Domestic Horrors in Eighty Clicks

The ever amusing Maid in Malaysia has tagged me for this one. Since I've been pretending to/trying to run a home for some decades now, I obviously have a huge stock of disasters to choose from, mostly in the elemental fire and water categories or rather joint category, wherein I'd put on something to boil/sterilise, forget all about it, and remember only when strange fumes commanded my attention and baby bottles and saucepans and pressure cookers had burned to a crisp.
The only good thing about the disaster I'm going to write about is that IT WASN'T REALLY MY FAULT*!!!!!
In the early nineties, we lived in a rather large, ramshackle house, all of one and a half floors. The other half floor was an open terrace. Well, with great enthusiasm, courage, and the landlord's funding, we decided to get the inside of the house painted. My youngest child was probably two or three at the time. You can imagine what a great venture it was- four bedrooms, a drawing room and dining room, a kitchen, a couple of balconies that needed painting, and tons of books, clothes and toys and assorted children and furniture that needed to be saved from the paint. Since the house was being painted for the first time in years, there was also much attendant plastering that had to be done.
We'd also decided to go in for different colours in different rooms. Our bedroom, downstairs, was a pretty pale blue. After what seemed like an endless time, the house was back to normal, more or less, and I was sitting in my bedroom with a cup of tea, admiring the clean and pretty walls. It started raining, which was fine with me, until I saw a patch of damp springing up on the wall overlooking the back yard. The patch of damp quickly turned into a small torrent- water was actually pouring through my brand new wall. Heart sinking, I rushed up to the terrace. Water was pouring into the storm drain and rushing down the pipe, which was quite normal. I peered over the wall and saw that there was a huge mound of sand blocking the drain pipe exit. I did rush down and made a futile attempt to unblock the pipe, but my heart wasn't in it. The newly painted house had completely lost its charm. I cleaned up my room as best as I could, but the water stains continue to haunt me, fifteen years after we left that house.

(*And of course it was all my fault- I should have made sure that the workmen had removed the leftover sand before finally leaving the premises).

I tag Itchy, Dottie, IBH, Unmana, Parul and Yashodhara.