Not on the Agenda

Sometimes life doesn't go quite as planned. Sometimes you can't predict how you will be spending your evening. Sometimes you can do your very best to plan ahead and be on top of things and unexpected things just happen.

Sometimes you're happily going about your day and suddenly you find a family room full of water. Ugh!

On Tuesday Carl took the day off so he could stay home and do some projects. Tyler's birthday party was yesterday and since we knew a lot of people were going to be here we wanted to clean the yard up a little from winter and do a few spring cleaning projects. So Carl was out working in the yard for a couple of hours. He was burning some things so he turned the faucet on in case he needed water. Apparently the frost-proof valve wasn't working and our pipe cracked during the winter some time. And when Carl turned the outside faucet on, the pipe started leaking all over our family room downstairs. But we didn't notice until a couple hours later when Carl came inside. He went downstairs to find water everywhere. Everywhere. Walking on the carpet was like stepping on a sponge. There were water marks all over the ceiling and paint was bubbling on the walls.

So Carl immediately had to go downstairs to try to clean it up. Ha! Like that was possible. When Tyler was in bed I came down and took a shift. We filled the shop vac three times with water from the carpet and then realized it was not going to make a difference. Eventually we turned fans on and just had to leave it until morning. You can't really see the water in this picture, but it's there, I promise. My feet were soaking wet and water bubbled out with every step.

We aslo had to turn our water off until we could talk with a plumber. So it was off for about 24 hours. Meaning no showers, no flushing toilets, no washing dishes, no cooking... So needless to say Tyler and I spent most of Wednesday out of the house.

On Thursday a plumber came out right away in the morning and fixed the pipe. A contractor came out soon after to assess the situation. He works with our insurance company and was able to tell us what would be covered.

On Friday morning a couple guys came in their neon green trucks to cut out sheet rock and tear out the carpet. They came at 8:30 am and left around 12:30. My family started coming for Tyler's birthday weekend a little after 1. Wow! Talk about cutting it close. :-)

We're very thankful that they were able to get the carpet out before people came because it was already making our house smell musty. We were able to get it pretty well aired out. The only problem was sleeping arrangements. We were planning on having people sleep in that room, which clearly couldn't happen. But for the most part everything worked out and we had our house cleaned up and back together by Friday morning!

They left those cool green fans and a dehumidifier to dry everything out over the weekend. Tomorrow we will hear what the plan is for getting everything finished. They will be back sometime soon (hopefully) to possibly take out some of the ceiling and replace it. And then they will repaint everything and put in new carpet in the whole family room and up the stairs. What a project!

I will be sure to put pictures up of our finished room when it is done.