Bad Luck

We seem to have bad luck with water. Almost 10 years ago we had a major incident in our home that happened while we were on vacation. We had gone to McCall over Christmas and returned to below freezing temps and water pouring out of our back door. It was one of those surreal situations were you just don't quite know what to do. I grabbed a large garbage can and started to try to collect water but it was bad. Like disaster bad. We shut off the water, surveyed the damage and got to work. The large pipe to our washing machine had burst and the entire downstairs was full of 3 inches of standing water. There was carpet, sheet rock and massive structural damage. We removed pictures and photo albums immediately and packed bags of clothing that we would use then for the next 3 months. A company came and packed up the entire house for storage. We spent the first night at our good friends the Paramores and then 2 weeks in a hotel. Our kids thought it was great fun. What's not to love about living in a place with a swimming pool and parents that are too overwhelmed to parent much? Amanda was about 4 and she watched a lot of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleading tryouts. The older kids invited all their friends to swim at the hotel. It was massively chaotic. We spent a lot of time on the phone with the insurance agent who became my nemesis. He wanted like extensive cataloguing of the damage. For instance if you had a book that was damaged you had to have the ISBN number, year purchased and exact price. I spent hours going through the dumpster on our property full of water damaged stuff. We hired a contractor and he was able to fix our home and did a really nice job for almost no profit on his part. (Thank you insurance guy). We lived in a shady duplex in town for 3 months and would lie awake at night listening to our loud, neighbors... being too scared to report them. Finally we had a home to move back into. I was so so excited that I stayed up like 4 days in a row without sleep cleaning and unpacking the boxes and putting our home in order. It was our first experience with home repairs on a pretty large scale.

Since this incident we have had a few minor flooding incidents. Mostly contained to one bathroom upstairs that had a leaky toilet and dripped down through the ceiling. It wasn't anything that all the towels in the house and some foot stomping frustration couldn't fix.

Last winter, Kris was preoccupied with basketball as per the last 5 years and didn't undo the hose from an outside faucet on the back side of the house until probably way after the freezing temps had started. I remember it giving me pause. Well fast forward to this week when he decided to reaccess the outside faucet with a hose and there after was a large popping noise. This noise was not checked into until 20 -30 minutes later when we discovered that the basement was flooded...well at least half of it. We sucked up a lot of the water with our carpet shampooer and we had really high hopes for a good outcome. Then 3 days later when it smelled like attack of the mold , Kris stayed up from 2am on and ripped out the carpet and pad from that part of the house. This solved the smell and mold problem and thanks to the help of a good friends power fan ... we were able to dry up the area. Now we just have to put the carpet back together and work on the pipes. No move out was necessary.

To add insult to injury... Kris went fishing this weekend and fell in the river and destroyed his phone.

None of these things are really big deals in the scheme of life. You wreck cars, destroy houses and after the replacements happen they just become distant memories and nothing permanent. It's not like losing people.

However, I am not proud of how annoyed I get at these inconveniences. I am great in a crisis of life or limb. Like calm and cool as a cucumber. Helpful, wise, level headed. But get me in a house flood situation and I become a little looney. Like raving lunatic, upset, unkind, impatient and down right mean. I am not proud of this fact. I am not super attached to my possessions but I do realize that I appreciate the comfort of a functioning home.

And that was this week.

I am currently eating raw cookie dough.

The end