I have to start with the back story before you can appreciate this post. After more than a year of travails building our house, we finally were able to move in June 3, 2017. If you’ve ever moved before, you know that it take weeks to get all the boxes unpacked and find a place to put everything. Since our last house was about 1200 square feet larger than this house, it’s been extra challenging and we’ve had to make some hard decisions about getting rid of stuff.
On June 30th disaster struck, the plumber who hooked up all the faucets and sinks was apparently very lazy. The faucets for the 2 bathrooms the kids use came with a pretty short woven metal supply tube. Instead of running to the store to get a longer one that would work with the piping he had done, he decided that it was perfectly fine to kink those bad boys into 170 degree angles to make it work. The faucet did not think this was a good idea and in complete stress and exasperation broke under all the pressure.
Water poured out of the supply lines filling up the sink cabinet, splashing happily out onto the tile floor, and running wildly down the hallway through the floor boards, sub-floor and with wild abandon into the basement garage. While walking from her bedroom back into the living room daughter thought it odd that she was wading in the hallway and decided to call out “UUHH dad? I think something is wrong here. There’s water in the hallway.” That was the understatement of the year.
It was a sickening sight to see the water coursing down the hallway. We scrambled to the sink, found the shut off valve & then grabbed every towel we could in the linen closet to soak up all the water, Once the main floor was done we ran downstairs to find water pouring out of the ceiling. The clean up of all this water resulted in about 50k in damage to the house, all for the expediency of the plumber not having to go buy about $40 worth of longer connection lines. Total tear out was hardwood flooring in both of the kids bedrooms, closets, the hallway and total tear out of both bathrooms the kids use (2 out of 3 bathrooms).
The insurance company fronted the money for repairs without too much bickering with them….of course there was some, but that is another story. But we were unable to find contractors that weren’t booked out until mid September. Not wanting to wait, hubby & I began the arduous task of getting our house put back together. Fast forward to this past weekend October 22 we are finally to the gleeful task of all work finished on the house, and unpacking the Pod to finally get the last of our lives back organized and put away. We finished the day’s work of organizing at 5pm.
Monday morning we awoke to rain. This was not a light drizzle, but very serious rain that turned into a hard downpour. Hubby went into the basement to find a tool and stepped into about 1″ of water. The beautiful finished garage basement completely done for only 19 hours was flooded with water. we spent several hours vacuuming up and squeegeeing the water out of the garage. The floor which was just painted the week prior now has scratches on it and we had to move a bunch of items & storage racks to get to the water. The basement is now a messy clean up area again.
We spent the remainder of the day devising a plan & implementing it to stop the water intrusion from the gutters permanently. We’ve had trouble with the gutters on that side not staying secured even though the gutter installers came out on 2 different occasions. Hubby got up on a ladder and took out the 1″ screw used by the gutter guys that had let loose, creating a sagging gutter that redirected the water into the house, and re-secured that gutter with a 3″ screw. We also took plastic sheeting, laid it 5 foot out from the edge of the house, topped it with 8 sheets of concrete board laid so the 5′ side went out from the house, Took left over weather seal tape from the build and taped the concrete boards all together and then covered it all with mulch to make it look finished. We can’t stop the water – only hope to divert it to head the other direction!
If we didn’t laugh we would cry. 4 months of work, finished for 19 hours and then a giant step backwards dealing with water again. Life is hard sometimes.