The week after we went on vacation, I came home from work and couldn't hear my dogs. Usually they hear my car pulling up outside and immediately start barking and getting all rowdy in their cage. On this day they weren't barking, even when I put my key in the lock and I started to get scared that there was something wrong with them. I thought for sure that they were dead. But as soon as I opened the door, I realized why they weren't barking. They couldn't hear me. Why? Because I had water pouring out of my foyer/hallway ceiling. I ran upstairs, assuming the water was coming from the bathroom and as I went into the bathroom, my first thought was "Did I forget to turn off the shower this morning?". It was not the shower however, it was the supply line running from the floor to the tank on the toilet. Luckily there is a shut off valve on this line and miraculously it worked and the water shut off. But I still had the immediate problem of what to do with the water that was not flooded throughout my house.
Steve had left that morning to go out of town for two weeks, so I called a good friend of ours and asked him to come help me. I knew that I was going to have to move furniture and stuff to clean up all the water. At this point the water had completed saturated my upstairs bathroom, the carpeting in my bedroom was wet in the doorway, the upstairs hallway carpet was soaked and the water had started to soak down the stairs. In the downstairs the water had soaked the entire ceiling, the walls and the flooring in the hallway/foyer(mind you we had just installed brand new laminate flooring in our living room, kitchen, and hallway/foyer). The water had also come through the ceiling in the living room and soaked our entertainment stand, it was sitting in 3 inches of water. And of course we have a ton of electronics in the living room - our 55 inch plasma tv, blu ray player, xbox 360, ps3, and wii (can you tell that we have no kids and spend lots of money on video game systems?). The water had also soaked into our basement. Needless to say, I think the water had probably been waterfalling in the house pretty much all day. I'd always wanted an indoor water feature, but this was really a little much.
Thank goodness that Steve decided he needed to be home and immediately left the job location he was on and drove 5 hours home. He took care of filing the insurance claim and dealing with the water disaster people. They came to the house the next day armed with industrial fans and massive dehumidifiers. We couldn't turn on certain lights because it would trip breakers which then meant a trip to the basement and the electrical panel to reset the breakers. And the worse part is that they had to tear down a few of our walls and rip up all of our flooring.
After 7 days of dehumidifiers, fans, and deconstruction, the house was finally dry. But it was bad. Really, really bad. We needed a new ceiling in the living room and hallway/foyer and new flooring in the living room, kitchen and hallway/foyer. They tore out a wall in the living room, 3 walls in the hallway/foyer, the flooring in the bathroom, the carpeting going up the stairs and at the top of the landing. All together the insurance adjuster said we had 10k in damages. And then began the reconstruction.
Oh wait .. we are still living in reconstruction world. 2 weekends ago we rented a storage unit to put all of our living room and dining room furniture in. Steve rented a drywall hoist and we began hanging drywall on the ceilings. But we couldn't finish the hallway/foyer ceiling because our bathroom shower started leaking. There was no sense putting up drywall until we knew that the shower wasn't leaking anymore. In addition to fixing the damaged rooms, we decided that we should do the dining room at the same time. It was the last room we had to finish in the house and I figured that if we were already going to be living in mass chaos, we might as well get it all done at once. Plus I didn't want to spend the time, effort, and money to do all of the other rooms and finish the dining room later, it just didn't make sense to me.
Right now most of the drywall has been hung, minus the few pieces in the hallway. We are just waiting for a friend of a friend to come in to mud and tape the drywall. He was supposed to come this weekend but had an abscessed tooth that led to an abscess on his jaw which led to emergency surgery yesterday morning. Hopefully he will be feeling well enough to come finish the work this weekend. I would love to be able to paint the weekend after Thanksgiving. Then we would only have to worry about the flooring and the bathroom. Yesterday I made the deposit for the flooring installation and ordered the hardwood from Lumber Liquidators. Hopefully, the floors will be installed the week before Christmas and we can move our furniture back into the house the week between Christmas and New Years.
But for now we are living mostly out of the kitchen downstairs and our bedroom upstairs. Thank goodness I bought Steve a tv for our bedroom as an anniversary present this year. Otherwise, we would be in big trouble. But our bed is comfy and the TV has a cable box and blu ray player attached, so for now we are set. I just hope I can last another month living this way. I miss my couch.
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