Sunday, January 29, 2012

The Flood Curse

As you may remember, we had a laundry room flood in the middle of the night six months ago when a washing machine hose burst.  We called in the big guns and they dried us out, replaced the whole downstairs floor and a month later we were back in business.   The nearly $15k job was covered by insurance except for our $2k deductible.  We never want to do that again so we got the braided, auto shutoff hoses that are guaranteed to not burst.

Fast forward to last Monday.  I unknowingly did a load of wash with the drainage hose out of the drain!  It got loose and fell out so all the water drained onto our new laundry room floor and seeped into the carpet and walls of our family room and into the crawlspace.  NOT AGAIN!  We called the mitigation company back and they came to assess the damage which wasn't nearly as bad this time.  They quoted us a price around $2k for dry out and re-installation.  We had to do the tear out ourselves to get this price which took us over ten hours.  We didn't want to go through insurance for something "minor" because it would raise our insurance premium by $500 per year from now until forever.  Still this "minor" repair cost is really going to set us back.  At least we're getting some home repair experience.

Last night I started taxes and can see that we're going to get a pretty nice return this year.  Whew!  We're going to be fine.

Now for today.  The half bath toilet overflowed, and though we got to it quickly, water still seeped through the wall and over into the laundry room sub floor that just finished drying out Thursday.  Can you hear us?  NOOOOOOOO!  At least we have that tax return coming.  This time I feel like we know exactly what to do.  We're buying a moisture reader like the mitigation guys have (except the one I just bought didn't work so Davin's out exchanging it) and rented some carpet fans from the hardware store.  We've seen this done before.  We're just hoping we don't have to rip up the laminate floor in the bathroom which would require removing the pedestal sink and toilet.  At least the new laundry room floor isn't installed yet so no tear out required there.  Just re-dry it!  I'd best go change out of my Sunday clothes and start tearing off the baseboards so we can assess the damage.