The bad news...

I'll start with the bad, yucky, make-me-ill, make-me-wanna-cry news...

After over a month of insisting that our kitchen smells like wet vermiculite (and being assured and reassured by our contractor that the area above our stove was cleaned out), I finally told G. that I'd wiped some brown drips off of the soffit area to the left of the stove and it came back a few days later. He said he was sick of waiting for the contractor to open up that area, and he'd just do it.

So he used the jigsaw to cut open one space between studs and found wet vermiculite. He kept going, getting to this:

(eventually he had seven neat little holes cut in every space between studs)

He sucked out five more HUGE garbage bags of wet vermiculite and insulation bags and building material scraps. And here's what some of the building material scraps look like:
Uh, yeah... That would be mold. Lots of mold--on just about everything stuffed into the soffit space.

Imagine a combination of drywall dust, paint dust, and vermiculite dust, and then imagine it all over my previously-clean kitchen--dishes and all.

And imagine the whole house once again permeated by the nauseating smell of wet (moldy) vermiculite.

After G. took out all the wet stuff he could, he got out the sprayer and sprayed the inside areas with mildicide and bleach, and we're letting it dry overnight (hope it doesn't rain or get really humid :( )

And I called the contractor. He's got someone coming in the morning to supposedly fix that drywall and to clean up all the ceilings in our house where the previous drywallers did some patching. With any luck, we may be able to paint and start to reclaim the rest of our house this weekend.

I'm still trying not to cry...

(p.s. good news coming tomorrow--it's about T, but I'm too tired to post tonight)