Besides being the name of a cool Jars of Clay song (I'm not into Christian rock unless it features Neal Morse of Spock's Beard, but I do like "Flood"), Flood is what happened to us a week ago, Saturday night.
I'd found a copy of the movie "The Forgotten" for $3 (I don't recommend it--it sounds kind of cool but it's not). We were watching it. April was keeping a load of laundry going.
And then we heard a knock on the door. We left the second bedroom (where we keep the TV) and found our living room and kitchen were flooded. The neighbors below us were at the door...water was leaking in through their lights. The hose behind the washing machine had come out, and water was everywhere.
This was 9:00 p.m. We spent the next four hours soaking up water with a machine from Albertson's. April's mom helped us out a bit, leaving at about 11:00. At 1:00 a.m. we were too tired to work, and we weren't getting much water out of the carpet anyway.
The landlord came and looked at the damage the next morning. We were up and working; I was trying to suck more water up from the carpet (it was coming, but slowly), and April was making sure things were dry. We decided to skip our 9:00 a.m. church to clean up, and we needed every bit of that time. The landlord rented a high-power fan from Home Depot, and I started drying out the carpet.
Meanwhile, all of our furniture in the living room, including a large desk, a bookshelf, and two heavy couches, needed to be moved. The couches are too big to move anywhere but to the kitchen (they don't maneuver easily into the other rooms).
Once the carpet was dry, I focused the fan on the pads below the carpet. Some of the wood underneath that was badly warped. This Saturday morning (almost a week after the flood), the landlord and I cut out the worst wood and replaced it. If all goes as planned, the carpet guy should be here Monday to put the carpet and the pads back down, and we'll be able to reclaim our living room.
4 comments:
That's when it's sort of nice to be renting...The joys of owning a house can be less than joyful at times. Some hard work is good, right?!
Something similar happened in Centennial 2 after you moved out and we moved upstairs. Our bathroom sink had been draining slowly, so we called for maintenance to come take a look. That old guy came on Friday and poured some chemical down the drain and left. If anything the sink was even worse. I was going to call again on Monday, because it wasn't an emergency at the time, and they wouldn't come over the weekend for a non-emergency. Rory was the last person to bed, and we guess he left the water on at a very low rate. When I woke up to get ready for 8:30 church, the carpet in the hallway was sopping! We had moved upstairs so the guys had water coming through their lights, just like what happened to you. We were all late for church. We even borrowed a carpet cleaner from Wood's parents to get as much water out as we could.
But instead of being cool and saying stuff like that happens, our landlords wanted to charge us $150 for damages. We all refused to pay since their own maintenance guy hadn't fixed the problem that lead to the flood. If the sink had been in good order, it never would have overflowed even at full blast. At least your guy is cool and only having you help him with repairs.
Actually, we're going to cover the cost for supplies (including renting a carpet cleaner and fan) and labor for the carpet layer.
Our landlord donated some of his time, though, which was nice.
I'm thinking it'll cost us more than $150, though I don't know yet.
Woah, I'm sorry! That really stinks (both literally and figuratively). I hope the recovery process is going well.
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