Homeowner Woes

I love our house. I do. And people did warn me that as soon as we moved in shizz would start to happen and the repairs and maintenance would be on us, but there are some days I really do miss our nutty old property manager and being able to place the responsibility on her to get things done for us. This past weekend for example:

1) Our 2 year old roof leaked. Into Leila's bedroom. Causing plaster to fall down around the A/C vent in her ceiling. The plaster that is still barely hanging is now Duct taped up. Ghetto fabulous I tell you, but can't do much about fixing that until we tackle the source of the roof leak. That 2 year old roof is under warranty for issues of workmanship and materials found to be at fault of the roofers. They went out yesterday and whatever the issue it is apparently one that is not covered by warranty. They're probably shifting the blame to the air duct work. I don't really know, but the woman who answers the phone gives me 2 word answers and says they'll send me an estimate when the owner of the company gets back in town...

2) PESTS. Yes, it is a 50 + year old attached row house. Yes, I recognize we will have pests no matter how clean we keep the place. However, it seems that my pest issues are always just slightly more gruesome than most. Sunday, I'm sitting on the kitchen floor playing with Leila and her train tracks when something catches my eye hanging out of the bottom of the dishwasher. I catch Cesar coming up the stairs from the basement and say "look down there, does that look like a mouse's tail to you." He looks and says "yeah, no, I think it may be a cable..." but puts on a latex glove and gives it a tug and sure enough, a nice, dried, rotting tail snaps off between his fingers. We had no clue how to get into the bottom of the washer to access the rest of the corpse and I had to go in search of the Kenmore manual. Finally figured it out and it was clear to our noses that the little guy had been there a while. Accompanied by a fair smattering of droppings and cockroach carcasses. Thank god for the suction of my Dyson's hose b/c I'd be do squeamish to clean it out otherwise.