Cats do land on their feet.

I came home today to find that disaster had struck at the remodel front. Greg has started working on the plumbing; because I insisted on having the washer and dryer right over there, the plumbing is a bit complicated. Before you shake your head at the stubborness of the fickle female, please note that Greg agrees- otherwise he wouldn't put them there.

He started cutting through the subfloor to find the existing plumbing. And find it he did... by cutting right through the pipes, resulting in a geyser of water hitting him square in the face and rapidly flooding the room. The water also dripped through the ceiling and flooded the powder room below. I arrived just in time to clean up the flood.

A short time later Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory had lulled the girls into sleep (after I argued with Cosette for the upteenth time that Willy Wonka was a boy even though he had long hair and girly shoes), the cleaning ladies were vacuuming, Greg was sawzalling something, and I had retreated from the noise up to the office to check email. All of a sudden I heard Greg shout "Piper! Piper! No!" and then a moment later I heard "Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god."

I went running to investigate, to find him hunched over the opening in the floor, looking down the shaft between two walls, to where Piper had fallen. He fell one story straight down and disapeared from sight. As all sorts of tragic possibilities flashed through our imaginations, we finally caught sight of Piper looking up at us:

See his tiny face at the very bottom there?

Great. He was alive. So now we had to wonder: how the heck were we going to get him out?
I suggested draping a sheet for him to climb up, but we weren't sure if he was hurt, if it would reach, or if he would climb. Greg took a more active approach:
Yep. He cut a whole in the wall above where he thought the cat was, then reached in and pulled him out.

The cat was fine. But I'm not sure if I'm going to survive this remodel with my sanity intact.