When It Rains…It Pours!

I’ve heard it said that bad things happen in 3’s.  I’m cringing for what may come next.  First the car accident and now our basement flooded…what’s next?  Three weeks ago I came home to a very eerie sound.  It sounded like the white noise you hear when a channel isn’t working on TV.  As I walked further into the house it sounded like someone was taking a shower in the walls around my stairs.  It was  then that I knew that something was terribly wrong.  I ran downstairs to my basement and…splash-splash came the sound my feet made as I took the first step off the bottom stair.  This is a just a small sampling of what I found…

We later found out that the pressure valve that maintains the water pressure from the city to our house went bad.  Our water softener couldn’t take the pressure and blew the seal which sprayed water not only into our basement but up the walls which then seeped through to our front room.  Our carpet is so light that you really couldn’t tell where the water came out so I didn’t include those pictures.  After frantically calling Trevor to find out how to turn the dang water valves off and to come home quickly, we called our insurance company.  They had us call in a clean-up crew who came in and tore all our carpet up, suctioned up as much water as possible and then infused our house with massive fans and de-humidifiers for the next week to dry the walls and remaining carpet.  Luckily, since we’d caught it in time there wasn’t too much damage.  We lost all of our 500 lbs of wheat since we hadn’t put it in buckets yet, our front room carpet had to be torn out since it wasn’t salvageable, and we lost a few other minor food storage items but that was it.  After clean-up costs and the outrageous cost of fixing the water softener the insurance company’s check allowed us to break even minus new carpet.  We’ll have to foot the bill on that one.  They said that the basement carpet was “re-useable” and that it could be stretched and re-tacked.  They’d only cover the cost of the front room.  If we chose that option, though, we’d have 3 different kinds of carpet throughout the house and that just isn’t going to happen.  Trev and I have wanted new carpet since we moved in so I guess this is just the push we needed to get it done.  Now it’s just a matter of painting the whole house with the old carpet still in before we get the new.  The basement living room is complete (I’ll upload pictures another day).  Now we just have to find time to paint the rest!  Wish us luck…lots of luck so a 3rd catastrophe won’t occur.