Basement Disaster

On the top of Murphy’s list there has to be some saying about small leaks only occurring when you are out of town for a week. After coming home from our Oregon trip (and you will remember from our posting about our Oregon trip that we were at the end of a very long and trying month), we were welcomed home by a massive flood in our basement. Of course I can make this a long drawn out story, but the short and skinny is sometime after I left to meet up with Katy and Caden in Oregon (probably the second I left the house), a mouse chewed a tiny-itty-bitty hole in a tiny pipe that goes to the ice-maker in our fridge. Tiny or not, a LOT of water came shooting out for many, many days. The water dumped into the wall behind the fridge and into the basement. The carpet, guest bed, TV stand, and a few other odds and ends were all ruined. For the next week large dryers and de-humidifiers were running at full tilt (night and day) in our house trying to save the walls. This obviously could not have come at a worse time. We were all sick, all tired and all at our breaking point. To add to all that came dealing with the endless noise of the fans, the worry of dealing with insurance, and the mess taking up half our house (did I mentioned our fridge was moved into the middle of our kitchen?!).

So not to be a downer, there was a lot of good that came out of this. We hated our basement carpet, we needed a new TV stand, and we wanted to paint downstairs. We just really, really, didn’t want to do it all right now. Fortunately, our insurance company was very fast, generous, and kind to us. Within a week we had a fat check in our hand, new carpet on order, and paint colors chosen (okay so we changed our mind MANY times on paint colors). Within another week, the basement was painted, the new carpet was in, and a brand new couch was on the way! This would later become another thorn in our side when the couch didn’t end up fitting down the stairs and had to be returned. We bought a Love Sac instead. We are just about back to normal now, and we have a new, pretty basement to show for it. Sometimes bad things can turn out for the better....

A few of the several fans drying out our walls

Note the new location of the fridge

We had a LOT of help painting thanks to Caden and MANY thanks to Matt, Rebekah, Morgan and Gavin!