Flooding and water damage update

 

As most readers will know, our home suffered water damage last Thursday night when our dishwasher decided to fill itself . . . and keep on filling itself, all night long.  Our insurance company was on the ball, and had ServiceMaster here within an hour of our filing a claim.  Yesterday they took out the last of their big drying-out machines and declared our home ready for repair and rectification.  Last night was wonderfully quiet, with no ventilation fans and dehumidifiers roaring!

Yesterday I visited three local flooring dealers, and arranged for each of them to come out here during the rest of this week, measure our home, and quote for replacing damaged flooring.  Our insurance policy will replace/repair to the same standards as before the damage, but not for any enhancements or improvements over that standard.  However, our laminate flooring (laid when we bought our house) was laid end-to-end down the length of the building, with no interruptions or joints.  That means, apparently, that to get that same quality of installation, we have to replace it in the same way, laid in one continuous pattern from one side of the house to the other, even though most of the laminate was not water-damaged.  The color or pattern of eight-year-old laminate can't be exactly matched, so it all has to be replaced.  That's likely to be very expensive!  Flooring's gone up a lot in price over the past eight years.  We'll see what the numbers look like.

The kitchen is another problem.  The water got underneath the ceramic tile floor, to the point where when one walked on it, water gushed up from the joints between the tiles, and washed out some of the grout.  Some of the tiles also cracked through people walking on them in their newly unsupported condition.  That means they'll have to be replaced, but again, they're an older pattern of tile that can't be matched out of modern stocks, so it'll have to be a full replacement.  That means taking up the old tile, scraping the grout and glue off the concrete slab, leveling the surface, then re-laying fresh tile.  Again, that's going to get expensive.  We'll see what the insurance company has to say.

When all that's been done, I still have to find a general contractor to patch the holes in the drywall made by ServiceMaster to remove wet insulation, replace baseboard and skirting-board removed to let the walls dry, and repaint the repaired walls.  I haven't even started to look for that yet.  I'll worry about the flooring first, and the rest later.  I can only do so much at once.

Today we have the first of the flooring companies coming in to measure for a quotation, and also an installer bringing our new dishwasher.  We went with a Bosch model, recommended by several readers in earlier comments and attracting more-than-usually-positive customer reviews on Web sites.  It has a lot more features than our old, relatively simple dishwasher, so I can see we have a learning curve ahead of us as we figure out how to do what, with which, to whatever.  It was expensive, but that sort of unexpected cost is precisely why we (and, I hope, you) have an emergency reserve fund.  It gives us peace of mind to know that in most situations like this, we can usually cope with the bills without panicking.  We'll rebuild the emergency fund over the next few months.

Blogging may be lighter than usual today as I juggle installers, measurers and other visitors.

Peter