Something about the way my house looks now makes me wonder if we’re moving in again, but all of the boxes and piles of objects have settled in their places, creased the new carpet, and just that is enough to tell me it’s not quite the same. There’s no longer the idea that everything has its place — that this bookshelf is best suited to this room, that this painting looks better in the light — but rather, a sense that all of the little objects have migrated and taken up residence in some entirely new place, and they’d be quite hard-pressed to have it any other way.

You see, we’ve remodeled recently, and nothing is quite where we initially had it. Yesterday, I was freaking out after I found the much-used toilet plunger on my bed. I promptly emptied half a bottle of Lysol, and I’m still wondering what the workmen were thinking when they put it there? “What’s this, a fancy bat? Who left it in the bathroom? Let’s put it back where it belongs.”

Good deeds will one day be the death of me.

Enough melodrama. I’m pissed. The light and fan switches upstairs are, surprisingly, no longer connected to the light and fan. The lights don’t go past a stylish “dim” that has me squinting at everything in the vicinity to make sure that the vacuum isn’t really an upright alligator admiring the view from the game room (stranger things have happened; also, I watched some stupid Animal Planet clip on alligators yesterday, so I’m on the alert). My brother’s room has been emptied of almost everything, and I’m not really sure where it went either. Probably my room, which until yesterday, had no walking room. I guess it didn’t help that the first thing I did after moving out was dump the three or four garbage bags of stuff I had on the floor, and two days later, got on a plane and went to India.

Did I mention there was a toilet plunger on my bed?

I’ve watched this remodeling take place in stages, most of them pretty much exemplified by chaos, disorder, and some strange brimstone odor that I blame on the rats in the attic, many of whom turned my bed into a communal crapping ground in our absence. Dear rats, I fondly loathe you.

• Stage A (The Problem): “I believe your ceiling is on the floor” or “What an unusual skylight!” (I hate hurricanes)
• Stage B (The Plan): “Let’s move all your crap around and make big piles of things! It’s like having a fort, only the towers are made of blenders and things!” (We have a lot of blenders)
• Stage C (The Unveiling): “WHERE IS ALL MY SHIT.”

I think the hardest part about how disorganized everything is is that the little things I used to see as constant — the fact, perhaps, that the coffee table would not be on the patio, or that the living room would not be a shrine to the Ravager God, Mail — aren’t quite there anymore. I haven’t seen a lot of this house in the past year, what with the hurricane and the remodeling and then India, but I’m hoping I can put it back together, and that there’s something underneath the layer of old carpet and giant boxes that makes the hard work ahead worthwhile.