The Washer Filled Up and the Floods Followed

What an adventure we find our lives to be at times.  We are definitely anything but boring.  Wednesday night I talked myself into going to a Relief Society activity.  Before I left, I asked George if he would switch the laundry loads and clean the bathroom.  I sat down with my dinner and was enjoying the guest speaker on Strengthening Relationships when I got a frantic call from my husband telling me to come home because the living room was flooded.  I raced out of there and came home to find an inch of water all over our first floor.  The laundry room, the living room, the kitchen, the storage area under our stairs.  I was kind of shocked.  Our washer was filling up and didn't stop filling up, it just kept going.  George had done what I had asked him to do and was cleaning the bathroom upstairs.  When he went back downstairs he found the water hadn't turned itself off and the house was flooded.  It also moved into the apartments behind us and next to us.

We moved as much stuff as quickly as possible.  George raced to his parents to get a shop vac and then our friends Reed and Steve showed up to help get as much water up as possible.  My dad got us in touch with a disaster relief guy.  We called our landlady who called her insurance and it went from there.  The soaked carpet was ripped up and fans were placed around our apartment to dry the floors.

We had to move most of our furniture and the stuff that was in the storage area up to our second bedroom.  I have to be honest, when I go in that bedroom I get a taste of what it must feel like to be a hoarder and I don't like it one bit.  We also have a little left in the corner of our kitchen.

 

After getting no sleep that night George and I went to work and school yesterday.  I left work early and went home when George was done with school in an effort to get some semblance of order around us, do all the wet laundry, and hopefully get some sleep.  George helped me get our room set up with all our Christmas stuff so that we can at least still have a Christmas tree and such. 

The disaster relief guys came back last night to work on getting the walls dry.  They had to tear out parts of the walls to get the air in them.  The bottom picture is hard to see but it is a picture of a hole between our apartment and our neighbors apartment.

Steve and Charlie cutting the wall

All in all, we realize how blessed we have really been.  George was home when it happened so it was caught sooner than later.  We had fabulous friends who came to help us clean up what we could before the disaster relief team got there.  We were lucky that my dad knew someone for us to call right away.  We're lucky that the insurance agency is covering everything but $250.  We were blessed that it was only the first floor and not the whole apartment.  None of our property was severely damaged.  We will wind up with at least new carpet (which we had been asking for) and our landlady won't even have to pay for it.  I get a new washing machine.  It has wound up providing an opportunity for George to do some contract work on the side helping the disaster relief team.  Overall, I feel like Heavenly Father is watching us, blessing us, and taking care of us.  We were reminded as well that we have a home still and there are so many people out there that have it worse than us.  We can live in one room for awhile.