Insulation nation

Remember yesterday when I told you there would be ultrasound pictures today? Scratch that. That would have been before the ridiculous Insulation Nightmare of 2009. I am thinking this one might go down in the record books.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that while the dudes were oozing the liquid insulation into the area near the kitchen sink, it was oozing right back on out under the sink through a hole in the cabinet. They were nice enough to heed my warnings about the hole, and cleaned everything up lickety split.

After spending most of the day here, they departed just before dinnertime. Thanks for the new energy savings (and the $750 tax credit!), see ya, buh-bye. When dinner time rolled around, I opened the cabinet to grab a pot to boil some water and found it covered in foam. Oh my. We forgot about the hole in the back of that cabinet that allows the gas line to reach the oven.

OK, I can handle it. I mean it's not ideal, but I can scrub out the pan and soldier on. But then I saw some congealed grease on the cooktop, under the stovetop grate. That's weird. We made bacon this weekend, but I know with 100 percent certainty that I cleaned the entire cooktop and backsplash. What the...?

I touched the congealed grease and sniffed it, only to realize that was no bacon fat, it was liquid insulation. In a panic I looked up and found white foam dripping down from the vents in my stove hood. I looked behind the hood pipe that goes all the way to the ceiling and saw nothing but white foam oozing out the sides of it. Oh my holy hell. Do these people have any idea how much that stupid fancy Wolf hood cost us? And that they filled it with foam? Guess the hole for the vent leading outside posed a problem.

Then I saw my three frying pans, conveniently left stacked on the cooktop for ease of use (read: no room in the cabinets to store them because we didn't exactly plan the functions of these cabinets when laying out the kitchen) also contained puddles of liquid insulation. I was about make my own puddle of liquid on the floor when I saw my poor All-Clad babies suffering like that. Not to mention the thought of paying to replace them was almost enough to send me into labor.

While shooing the kids into the living room to watch The Wiggles, I started yelling for Josh. No answer. I looked all over for him, finally locating him in our bedroom on a conference call. I can now tell you the universal sign for "holy shit, there's foam everywhere in the range hood" looks like a seven-months-pregnant woman waving her arms over her head and making puffed-cheeked faces that get progressively more full of air until she pops. I am a genius when it comes to charades, you would totally want me on your team.

Josh determined after some investigation that the fan mechanism itself was not filled with foam. A large, speeding bullet was dodged on that one. Can you imagine turning on a vent filled with foam insulation? We would have had our very own snowglobe in the kitchen. Shake it up and watch it fly!

Of course, the company was closed for the day so we had to wait until this morning to bitch about the state of affairs. Do you know what 12 hours with liquid insulation on her very delicate stovetop does to a seven-months-pregnant woman? It makes her very stabby. After throwing an enormous tantrum about the whole thing when I got home from a school meeting, Josh remarked that I was acting like Jack and maybe I needed to go to bed early. Oh yeah? Maybe you would like some liquid insulation with your scrambled eggs tomorrow morning. He tried to clean it off and it wasn't coming out and I was so over the whole thing and went to bed, leaving him to deal with it.

Josh played bad cop this morning and called the company. Their response was to tell us to try using warm water and if we couldn't get it out, they would send someone over with some cleaner. Riiiiight. Warm water. Like we didn't think of that.

Being the pessimist that I am, I knew it would probably take forever and a day for them to send someone out and that person would probably use some forbidden harsh chemical or steelwool sponge on the precious cooktop that can't be cleaned with any known cleaning product except water and vinegar, so I took matters into my own hands.

While Emmie ate lunch and well into her naptime, I scrubbed. And scrubbed. And scrubbed. Heavy-duty stainless polish and a microfiber cloth got it all off of the stainless steel portions. Hot water, a regular sponge and my body weight got it off the cooktop. And Barkeeper's Friend (my absolute favorite cleaning product ever) got it out of the pans.

There's still two burner covers that are covered with flaky white crap and one of the grates doesn't want to give up the fight, so I am going to have Josh take a stab at those and if he can't get 'er done, then I am telling the company they can try to clean them to my satisfaction or I want them replaced.

I'm sure they also won't mind when I sue their asses after WeeBey comes out with three arms and eight toes after the exposure to this chemical shit. They assured us when we signed the contract that the substance in question was totally! environmentally! friendly! My ass. I smelled that shit and it smells like chemicals. I am pretty sure they weren't spraying ground-up rose petals and banana peels into my house.