Today marks the one year anniversary, of what I refer to as, “The Flood”. September 29, 2010, exactly 4 months after we had moved into our current home, I came home to a flood that would forever change the way our home looked. Malea and I had only been gone for about 1 hour and when we came home our entire kitchen, laundry room, master bathroom and master bedroom were flooded. As soon as I walked in the door and heard water gushing I knew something was wrong. Because our house is an older home {built in 1965} the hot water heater is in the laundry room. Turns out the main water line that runs to the hot water heater had exploded and water was literally gushing from the walls.
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| Entryway hallway and kitchen. |
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| Kitchen which connects to the laundry room. |
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| Laundry room and master bathroom. |
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| It’s hard to capture how deep the water really was but this is a better view. |
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| Master bedroom. |
Standing in my laundry room, in ankle deep water, I didn’t even know where to start. I quickly called Matt and told him to come home ASAP, then I called some friends to come take Malea so that we could get the water cleaned up. Next I called our home warranty company and insurance and then I started vacuuming. I vacuumed water for over an hour. A good friend of ours stopped by and helped me vacuum the water but it took forever to get most of it out! I’m so glad we took the time though because if we hadn’t there would have been a lot more damage.
A couple hours later the disaster crew showed up to rip up flooring and fill our house with huge blue fans. They spent 1 1/2 days tearing our house apart and drilling holes in every wall effected by the water damage. The first night we tried to sleep at home but it was so loud and so hot from all the fans that we just couldn’t bear it. We ended up living at my in laws and our best friend’s houses for 3 weeks. I was incredibly grateful for their hospitality but it’s really hard not being at home when you have a 1 1/2 year old!
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| Our bathroom with the linoleum pulled up. |
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| This is what it looked like for over a week. |
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| Laundry room. Don’t you just love the original GREEN linoleum? |
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| Kitchen with 1/2 the linoleum pulled up. |
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| These holes were everywhere in our house! It was so sad. |
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| The entry hallway and closet. |
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| Master bedroom. |
It gets worse.
After our first night away from home Malea and I went back over to the house to get a few things. I was walking around when I noticed even more water! This time the water had flooded the other half of the kitchen and our dining room!!! Right away I called the disaster crew. They came right over and discovered that the refrigerator line had burst. Lovely. So they brought in even more fans and more of our house was ripped apart.
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| Dining room carpet flooded. |
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| New water leak in the kitchen. |
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| Everything from the kitchen and dining room being stored in the living room. |
It get’s worse.
The next day I had to be at the house to meet with contractors, PG&E and the Asbestos Testing Rep. Turns out we had asbestos in the bottom layers of linoleum and in some of our sheet rock, awesome. Also turned out we had a gas leak so PG&E shut off our gas, awesome.
At this point I was overwhelmed but beginning to feel like this was just a huge joke. How could it seriously get any worse? Two floods, asbestos and a gas leak… really? Oh and I mentioned this was only 4 months after we moved in right?!?
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| My husband said this reminded him of ET. We were really trying to find the humor in all of this! |
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| Kitchen stripped bare. |
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| Laundry room and bathroom stripped bare. |
After a very long and, literally, disastrous couple of weeks there was finally a ray of hope. Since obviously my old linoleum was never coming back I got to go pick out new floors. Beautiful hardwood floors.
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| The first good thing I’d seen in over 2 weeks! |
We were told that the carpets would dry out and look new again so insurance would only pay for them to be cleaned, they wouldn’t replace them. Bummer. So the rebuilding process began.
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| Beautiful new floors. I love them. |
After a few days of construction we were finally able to move back in. It was almost exactly 3 weeks that we were out of the house.
Then it gets worse.
We moved back in only to discover that the carpets are actually water stained. This was good because it meant I got to get new carpet but it was also bad because it meant more meetings with the insurance adjuster, more shopping for flooring and more construction. We pretty much lived at the flooring store for a couple of weeks. They loved us there and I ended up sending them a Christmas card. Yeah, we spent that much time there!
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| My new carpet choice. So much better, I never really liked the old stuff anyways! |
In the meantime, It gets worse.
I’m not joking, it was one thing after another for about a month! While we were waiting for our carpet to come in the refrigerator line leaked again! This time it was a slow leak that was pushing water under our new wood flooring. We ended up with a few large bubbles under the wood so our contractor had to come back and replace 1/3 of flooring in the kitchen, and fix the leak, of course!
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| You can see the size of one of the bubbles up against this pen. |
After the 2nd refrigerator leak was fixed and the floors had been replaced again it was time for new carpet! We moved everything out of the house and within a day the new carpet was in!
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| SO pretty and SO much better! |
After the new carpet was installed we were finally ready to move on with our lives. The house felt new, it looked beautiful and we were ready to relax. It was a very long 6 weeks {total time, including carpet installation} but in the end it was worth it. There is no way we could have afforded to put in all new wood flooring and re-carpet the whole house any time soon, so even though it was a huge headache to go through The Flood, in the end, and after a few weeks of recuperating, I was incredibly grateful for the huge improvement that had been made to our home! New wood flooring in kitchen, laundry room and master bath, new water heater, and new carpeting throughout the house!
So as you can see September 29th is a day that will forever be burned into my memory. It’s funny how something so disastrous could end up being something I’m grateful for every day. I love how it has changed our home!
Before
After
I just stumbled upon your blog and clicked over to this post, and felt that I must comment. In our old house in LA(we recently sold it to move to Northern CA), our hot water heater drained to the crawl space. It was the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving: 13 months after we moved in, 6 months after we were married, and 12 weeks after we used the rest of our savings/wedding money to refinish the white oak hardwood floors in our house. Our hot water heater had been leaking, causing 90% of our house to be covered in mold. It was a disaster. I ended up with pneumonia (twice), we lived with my family (an hour away) for nearly three months. BUT, we were able to remodel our kitchen and laundry room, and we now joke that if we could handle that in our first year of marriage, we could handle anything. So, there is a silver lining (when all is said and done!)
Anyways, great site. Love all the decorating ideas, and will be surely be following along with your decorating ideas now that we’re home shopping AGAIN. 🙂
Oh my goodness. I’m not even sure what to say… I’m glad that it worked for your favor but I can’t even imagine what you went through! It definitely puts my experience into perspective. 🙂 I’m just glad that we both came out ahead!!! 🙂
Anna