Nothing snaps you back to reality after a vacation like coming home to a broken water heater and a flooded basement! Fooling around time is officially over, lol.
The water heater guys came out yesterday and gave us estimates. We are leaning toward a tankless water heater at the moment. It's the greener choice but it will also be great to have it up on the wall and out of the way for when we demo the basement (which we will certainly have to do after all this dang flooding.)
We finally bought a shop vac. Just $33 at Kmart for a 6 gallon Craftsman. I have no flippin' idea why we waited so long. I will never, ever mop up a flooded basement with a regular old sponge mop again! You just plug the shop vac in, drop the end of the hose in a puddle, flip the switch, and stand there holding the hose while it sucks water from every direction. When the tank is full the vacuum stops sucking and you just roll it over and dump it out. I love it!
We also had a claims adjuster come out and look at the roof. We've known since we bought the house that it needed a new roof but haven't been too eager to pay for it. Then, about a month ago, a roofing guy came by and told us that we may qualify to have it covered by insurance because there was a big storm last November that damaged a lot of homes in the area. He took some pictures for us to send our insurance company and when we got home from vacation Ross emailed those in to our agent. Now we've got the approval to move ahead and it's time to pick the company to do the work. Our neighbors just had theirs done, we are going to ask about the guys they used.
The bad news is they won't cover the roof on my screen porch :( It seriously needs to be replaced - it leaks a ton and it would just look weird if we did the whole house (and the garage) and left the porch. We'll have to see how much it would cost to pay for it ourselves.
Next thing to tackle is the bathroom! We're going to tear out the walls around the shower, replace them as inexpensively as possible, and install new hardware because the stuff that is original to the house is starting to leak. Should be interesting!
2 comments:
Feeling a little less chipper about all this than I was this morning! I've vacuumed three times now and the water just keeps coming back. Maybe we were wrong and the water isn't coming in from outside? Grrrrr.
Also, I cut out a big chunk of drywall in the laundry room that was covered in black mold only to find that the opposite dry wall is also infested on it's back side, so I'm gonna have to start cutting into the storage room now too, which was the only room that seemed to have survived the flooding.
oh Kim how overwhelming!! So sorry!
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