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Vacation Update
So a couple weeks ago I told you that we were going on vacation for the weekend. We had an good time! We visited IKEA, Trader Joe, Whole Foods, University of Michigan, and just hung around at the hotel and in the pool. It was a very nice relaxing time. We really enjoyed walking around IKEA, one of my favorite things was the area that were set up as a small house (they had a couple that were under 500 sq ft for a whole house). These areas were really cool because even though they were tiny they managed to fit everything you would need in a home in. It was really cool. I liked this the most because we have a small house, under 1000 sq ft, and it was cool to see what we could do with our space. We had heard from a lot of people that IKEA had a lot of things for really good prices. We found that the prices at IKEA were actually quite a bit above what we usually pay. We buy second hand at garage sale and Good Will half off sales. If you are comparing IKEA to other store prices you probably are getting a good price, but not when you compare to garage sale prices (Yes I know that stores are incapable of selling that low, and I also realize that if no one bought new then there would be no people who bought new there would be no second hand items to buy used, so thank you if you buy new :). We ended up buying a lamp, a silicone fun shaped ice cube try, a bottle of sparkling juice, and a present for a family member. We visited Trader Joe because we heard that they had a lot of organic food for good prices. We don't usually buy organic food so I really should have priced organic food here, but I didn't see any prices that jumped out at me as superb. I am making my own baby food and have decided that I will buy the dirty dozen organic so I need to find a good source for those organic foods. While on the way to Trader Joe I noticed a Whole Foods. I had heard about Whole Foods on eMeals and I was curious so we stopped there too. We enjoyed the samples and seeing what they had, but once again the prices were too high for us. When I was researching the Ann Arbor area it seemed that the biggest tourist thing there is the University of Michigan. In addition to being a beautiful campus it also had several free museums that were open to the public. So we went there and walked around the campus a little bit and visited the art museum. It just so happened that the weekend we were there was the new student day on campus so we also got to hear a few snippets of tours. It was fun to see all of the new students and relive our early college days (although it did make parking a nightmare :) Other than that we mostly hung out at the hotel pool and relaxed in our room. Over all it was a good vacation.
Wonderful (not really) Surprise
When we came home from vacation we were unloading everything from the van and I heard this dripping noise. I followed it into the kitchen and found water streaming out of the cabinet under the sink and running all over the floor. I opened the cabinet and saw the pipe that runs to the dishwasher shooting water out against the side of the cabinet. I have to admit my first thought was to call Mr. Random to take care of it, but i am a (ex)contractor's daughter so I know a few things about home maintenance. I know that most pipes have a cut off valve in case of things like this. So I tried a couple and found the right one and shut off the water. Then I went out and told Mr. Random what happened (it is actually a good thing I found it first so I could prepare him because he is the one more likely to stress in the family). He went in the basement and said it looked like a rainforest down there. The water had leaked through the floor into the basement and was a couple inches deep down there.
How to Deal With Water Everywhere and Water Damage
We tried to sop up as much of the water as we could. We went through all the towels in the house in less than an hour. Mr Random took care of getting stuff out of the basement (we were storing a lot of cardboard boxes down there that were totally ruined, fortunately nothing expensive was ruined) and getting the water out down there. Unfortunately we keep our cat's stuff down there so he had to deal with dirty, cat litter/feces/food water. Mr. Random called my dad to come over and look at it to see what we needed to do. Dad said that in all his years in construction he had never seen a pipe just fall off like that. Somewhere along the line we got the idea that we needed to call our insurance company about this problem so I called them on Monday and found out that this was covered after the deductible. So we called Servepro out to look at it and see what needed to be done. They came out and said that the entire kitchen and bathroom floors need to be taken up and everything dried out then things would be put back together. They brought in two huge industrial dehumidifiers and two huge air movers (all of which are very noisy, fortunately it is a constant noise so it doesn't disturb Little Man too much, but still it is very noisy and you can't hear anything from one room to the next in our house) and which we were supposed to let run constantly. Well the first night they were running we noticed that it was starting to get rather warm. The Servepro guy had warned me that the dehumidifiers put out a lot of heat so we had had the air conditioner running. (long story short there is a leak in our air conditioner and the fluid was so low that the pipes froze solid and no air was blowing, but we didn't find that out until the next day when we paid an air conditioner company way too much to come figure out why it wasn't working, did you know air conditioning fluid costs $36 per lb?) So we had to leave them off for a day until we got the air conditioner fixed because it was almost 90 degrees with the dehumidifier running. So anyways when things got back on schedule and when we finished getting approval from the insurance company they started taking up the floor. Our house is 126 years old and apparently it is common just to put flooring over old flooring, not take it up first so there are 3 layers of flooring to get through before getting to the wood beams. And let me tell you that was one fun day with a baby because taking up a floor is noisy! We ended up hiding out in Mr. Random and I's bedroom with a play pen and a fan running for white noise and a movie for more noise. When it was time for Little Man's nap I put him down in the play pen and hid behind pillows so he wouldn't know I was there to work on my computer (the movie was playing on it so I couldn't go in the other room). So yeah, it was fun, but we made it through and Little Man did eventually fall asleep (after much fussing on and off). Little Man is a champion sleeper, if your baby isn't you might consider going elsewhere for this time. So anyways this has been big buckets of fun and it will continue to be for a couple more weeks. But on the plus side we are getting completely new flooring in the kitchen/dining room and bathroom and the back room of the basement. All we have to pay is our $500 deductible and we will actually get some money back because we will get paid for the time we spent drying and moving things and the extra on the electrical bill.
So what do you do when you have a bunch of water where it shouldn't be?
- Sop up what you can
- Call your insurance company
- Call a water damage restoration company if recomended to
- Go from there with what they say
- Keep track of all hours you spend doing anything that a company might do such as moving things, sopping stuff, etc.
The kitchen - the fridge has been moved into the dining room, the stuff from the counters is in another room, the big green box by the stove is the dehumidifier, the two littler green things are the air movers. The floor is torn up to 1 layer of flooring on top of the wood beams in the center.
You can see the different layers of flooring. The bottom one is an ugly green tile from the 50s. Next is an ugly sparly vinyl from the 80s, then the particle board that was under the current vinyl (which is completely gone)
Another view of the kitchen. The offending dishwasher pipe is not fixed yet so we are using mostly disposable dishes. And they brought a second air mover for upstairs because it wasn't drying fast enough.
The basement. Another dehumidifier and air mover. In the back left corner you can see the back room, that is where the floor will be replaced downstairs. Mr. Random is excited about that because he was planning to redo that room this winter and now we gt the floor replaced for free (we consider most of this free because we passed the deductible with just a portion of the drying cost)
Fun stuff right? :) Well on to the linky party!
Linky Party
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I'm so sorry about your kitchen. That has to be a terrible way to return from a vacation. That happened to a friend of ours but in an upstairs bathroom. It destroyed most of their house in just a matter of hours while they were at work. Thanks for hosting the party despite the mess you have to deal with.
ReplyDeleteThank you, it was bad to return to. We are now looking at the positive of getting new flooring that we get to pick :)
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