The first day of school was a Monday. Ryan left with some friends on a day trip to Montana to golf. It was a long trip and he wasn't expecting to get home until late. That afternoon an adjuster from Allstate stopped by to look at our roof. There was a hail storm in 2018 that caused a lot of damage and so many people were getting new roofs. We had ours looked at back then but they said it was fine. We didn't push it at the time because Ryan had just barely raised our deductible to $5000 so we weren't exactly hoping for damage. But Ryan asked Allstate to come check again because we certainly didn't want roof problems. So the Allstate guy talked to me that afternoon and told me there was indeed damage and we were going to get a new roof.
That evening Dylan had a soccer game. I left Kylee home in charge of cooking Mac n Cheese for them for dinner and I took Dylan to his game. Once I got home, they were eating their food and I started getting my dinner ready and cleaning up the kitchen. I was home for maybe 30 minutes when Kaden ran back to his bedroom and stepped in water. He said, "Mom, why is there water in my room?" I said I would come check in a minute. As I walked back there, I stepped in a puddle right outside the bathroom. I looked in the bathroom and saw an inch of water on the floor and I could hear the toilet running. I immediately turned the water off. I took a look around and thought 'I don't have enough towels in the house to clean this up'. I sent a quick text to a group of neighbor girls asking if anyone owned a wet/dry vac I could borrow for an emergency. Then decided to just go rent one. As I was driving I called my mother in law. I would have called my husband but I figured he would not have much service as they were driving back. Cheryl had just had a flood in one of her apartment buildings, and I figured she would have some advice. She said, "if it's that bad, you probably need to call a restoration company." So I called Ryan to ask him if that was what he wanted to do, and I headed back home without getting a vacuum. Ryan called someone and told me to wait for them to call me. I was pacing around trying to figure out where to even start, knowing it needed to be dealt with sooner than later. The company he called was not in a big hurry. While I was waiting for phone calls my neighbor Jen and her husband showed up at my door. She had sent texts asking about my emergency and what she could do but I had ignored them because I didn't even know what to do myself. But they had a shop vac and I let them in while talking on the phone and they went to work.
Up until this point I hadn't even wanted to think about the basement. But Jen was offering help so I told Kylee and Sadie to go downstairs and check Sadie's room. Then I heard Sadie wailing. Her closet was SOAKED. Everything was wet. There was a lake in her room.
What happened? Well, we are pretty sure that Kylee clogged the toilet (something that used to happen quite often, and she knows how to fix- though she doesn't like to of course, but it hasn't happened in awhile and it had NEVER led to an actual overflow). Kaden used the toilet and flushed it, but it was clogged. And then the toilet ran (something that has been happening frequently! Which is why I heard the toilet running in the back of my mind but didn't think much of it when I was busy doing other things.) How did it not get noticed for an hour? Kaden saw the water rising instead of flushing. He told Kylee. But she was in the kitchen cooking at the time. It's easy in hindsight to realize she absolutely should have gone to check. Any person who has ever had to sanitize a bathroom after the toilet overflows would know to rush back there and solve the problem before any water leaves the toilet. But in her defense, our toilet had never overflowed in this house. The last time a toilet did in our old house was when she was pretty small and she does not remember. So I may have freaked out in the moment and gotten really frustrated that this mess could have been avoided if she had taken a second to go check on the toilet. She knows how to turn off the water. But we can't put it all on her shoulders. If the toilet had actually overflowed while Kaden was still in the bathroom, he would have freaked out, I'm sure of it. But he must've left before that happened. It was just a perfect combination of events to create a perfect storm.
As I gave the people all my info on the phone, Jen got to work gathering all of Sadie's hundreds of stuffed animals and clothes from her closet and laying them out on the patio or bagging them to be washed. James started sucking up water from the carpet upstairs with his big shop vac. He filled it a couple times upstairs and then I sent him downstairs. Because upstairs the water was maybe 5 feet out of the bathroom. Downstairs it was 1/3 of our basement. All of the water had gone down the vent into the wall in between Sadie and Dylan's closet, but mostly into Sadie's room.
Over an hour later when the Paul Davis guys showed up, this was after 9pm on the very first day of school. My kids should have been going to bed because they never get much sleep that first night. The guys finally show up and start evaluating things. I expected them to extract as much water as possible, and then pull up carpet and maybe cut some holes in the walls to let it air out. That was not their plan. They started talking about how it's toilet water, dirty toilet water (though it was from little Kaden and the small chunk in the toilet was still intact in the toilet when I got home so I really wasn't too concerned about contamination). They said EVERYTHING that got wet was garbage. EVERYTHING. Mean carpet, walls, toys, etc, etc. It was a bit much for me to comprehend and my anxiety levels were through the roof. Once they showed up I told Jen and James to go home because I assumed they were going to take over. They did not try and remove any water. The guys says, "he did a good job getting the water" and he brought in a few 'dehumidifiers' which I don't think did a darn thing. It was a lake. I had to put towels down upstairs because our feet were getting so wet. And downstairs was much worse.
They got to work on demolition pretty quickly. I was still not convinced we needed to toss the carpet. I was picturing them patching new carpet in and how bad it would look. And the downstairs carpet was not even that old. The good news was the water seeped its way into every single room except the office. Which meant insurance should cover new carpet in all those rooms. Even the stairs where the paint stain was. I wanted new carpet. A lot actually. But it was overwhelming to think about moving everything in our house to do it. It was overwhelming to have them boxing everything up in the kids closets so they could cut holes in the wall. They were marking things as "non salvageable" even though I didn't think they needed to be thrown out. They told me Sadie's furniture would all need to be tossed because it had water damage on the bottom. If insurance is paying for it, I shouldn't care but I assembled all of her furniture all by myself when we moved her into that room and it was overwhelming to think of doing it all again.
Having the kids displaced was very stressful for me. Sadie's room was gutted. They moved her bed into the family room downstairs and we packed her clothes into boxes she could get into. I had a great idea to call Sherri who had just sold her clothing business because she had clothing racks in her house. I borrowed her clothing racks to get the clothes out of the closets so the kids could still get to them and we didn't have to pack them up. But this is where Sadie was living and what my house looked like. I could not use the treadmill (luckily it was warm outside so I didn't really need to) I couldn't use the weight set very easily. I couldn't use it in the morning while she was sleeping anyway. It was kind of a nightmare. And she had to live like this for THREE MONTHS.
They put up these plastic walls to keep the dust out but also to "sanitize" the areas. I rolled my eyes at the whole sanitation stuff. Dylan slept on the couch upstairs for a little bit but he hated it so decided to just go to his bedroom. The guys were like "he could get sick". As if he's a baby who crawls on the floor and puts things in his mouth? Having this downstairs was not the worst, though it was annoying trying to carry anything through it. But the upstairs one as a smaller opening and it was noisy and it was such a PAIN.
They spent the week demolishing it. Then they sprayed a sanitizer all over and then set up the big fans for like three or four days. Then they packed up and said their work was done, and they would let the reconstruction people know we were ready to be added to their list of jobs. I had no idea how long their list was. I had low expectations. When two months passed and I still hadn't heard anything, I wasn't all that surprised. We finally got a call from Paul Davis and the guy said "it doesn't usually take the insurance company this long to approve it." So I guess they were waiting on Allstate? And perhaps Allstate was taking so long because they found it suspicious that we had two huge claims in the SAME DAY? The roof people started working before the demolition people were done. And even though I had friends that said their roofers were done in two days, ours took THREE WEEKS. They were parking in our driveway when I was trying to leave. There were nails everywhere (and cigarette butts and soda cans) and they piled the boxes of shingles on my driveway where I couldn't get my car out and they just left them there for weeks. Ryan and I had to move them enough so that I could get my car out. It was just a lot.
They finally said they would start reconstructing the walls at the beginning of November. Again, I had to be around while they rebuilt Sadie and Dylan's closets, patched all the holes in all the walls, installed trim, and painted. They did a great job. Even my bedroom was inconvenienced though because they had moved Ryan's nightstand to the foot of our bed. Then they moved the bed forward a foot or two so he could redo the trim behind it. Once it was all finished I kept thinking how huge my room felt!
Sadie and I had been planning a birthday party for her. And I just didn't want to have wet paint or torn up carpet during her party. We got quite lucky that the guy finished the walls right before the party, and the carpet guys started that next week.
Paul Davis provided boxes for us and we packed up a lot of things. But they helped pack too. And then they moved all the furniture. It was so nice! I think we would've had to move it ourselves if we had just done the carpet ourselves. It was nice to dust behind the dressers and desks and things too.
I didn't get a picture with the balls put away, but I was so happy to get rid of all the baby toys that were cluttering the basement. And I was so happy that we rearranged the treadmill and couches to hide the treadmill a bit. It was always the first thing you saw when you came downstairs. This is much better. It's so nice having so much open space! I will not put the table back down there because it just gets used to dump stuff. We did get a fuseball table that takes up some room, and we will probably get something else (ping pong? pool?) but I still like it so much more than before!! And the kids love to play down there, usually with those balls.
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