the great flood

Most of the time, being a home owner is WONDERFUL! Privacy, no window scraping in the dead of winter for work in the mornings because of a garage, no hand washing a sink full of dishes after they have quickly accumulated over night, etc. but sometimes... sometimes being a homeowner is the pits. 

For example, when your one year old still brand new house floods for the SECOND time since moving in. Now that, that is a far cry from wonderful. 

It was 11:30 at night and we had been asleep for at least 3 hours. With a baby around, an 8:30 bed time is not an unusual thing around here. I woke up to the sound of extremely loud running water. My momma instincts went into overdrive. Liam has a sound machine in his nursery that was turned on low to a rainfall setting. The sound that woke me literally sounded exactly like it but FULL BLAST. In my current state of mind, being totally out of it, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that someone was in Liam's room and had cranked the sound machine so I couldn't hear them. While I am beyond thankful that wasn't the case, the alternative was still not fun. I shook Nic awake and together we went sprinting out of or master bedroom to find this...

an inch of water in our kitchen! wah wah

Who knows HOW long it had been running but it turns out a hose that connected our dishwasher to a valve blew and was gushing water all over the place. Call it faulty part, installed wrong, whatever the case may be... we have endured 2 months of something I would never wish upon my worst enemy. I think I may have already said this before after our first water fiasco in this house but leave it to us as first time home owners who are incredibly naive to think that buying a brand new home would lead to no problems. Far cry! The first thing we did was shut off the water which was in the basement. I remained upstairs and what I could hear Nic yelling below did not sound good at all. There was water raining from the ceiling into our basement!!

 While assessing the damages, we discovered the water soaked the kitchen, a quarter of the living room carpet, the hallway carpet, and the guest bedroom carpet upstairs. It had also rained through the ceiling and was covering the basement floor. I guess if we are thinking about the positives here, we are lucky our basement isn't finished. We called a restoration company in the middle of the night and it took them 2 hours to get here. Those 2 hours felt like an eternity when all you can do is to stare at an inch of water and every last towel you own sopping wet. When they finally showed up they immediately began ripping the carpet back to begin the drying process. While Nic was on the phone with our insurance company, the restoration guys asked if we had a child 6 years or younger in our home. I was in the nursery with Liam at the time and he came in to tell me that they were spraying chemicals to prevent mold growth and that we had to get Liam out of the house. Neither of Nic's parents were answering their phones and because the air was turned off to the house, I began to feel light headed in Liam's room. The insurance company over the phone asked if we had running water and heat to which Nic responded honestly with yes, and because of that answer and "according to their policy" our house was deemed livable and they wouldn't pay for a hotel. Such a horrible experience. We finally got a hold of Nic's mom to tell her we were on our way over because we had no where else to go. I typed up lesson plans for a substitute and we dropped them off on the way over to her house. At this point, it was 4:30 in the morning and we had been up all night. We tried to get what very little sleep we could before having to meet with the restoration company again in the morning.

That night began what has been 2 months of a nightmare. We lived at Nic's mom's house for a little over a week before it became so inconvenient to travel to and from our house and work each day with her living clear on the opposite side of town. As soon as the 15 or so fans were removed from our home and the drying process was done, the three of us moved back in to our master bedroom, the only room left untouched and functional in our house. There we have stayed amongst those four walls for the last 6 weeks. During that time there have been so many different workers in and out of our home tearing up and gutting the entire kitchen, replacing tile, reconstructing the cabinetry, etc. I can't even count the number of meals we have had at Costa Vida. 

We were ready to be done with this whole process a long time ago. It feels so good to be almost on the other side of this mess now. The last of the workers come Monday to finish the final touches before we will officially have it behind us for good. We are hoping and praying that this is the last of the water problems we will have with this house. Here's to fingers, toes, and whatever else you can cross. ;)