I will be the first to admit that I have been dreading the month of February this year for quite some time now. February has become a very busy month for me as a mother since I have one holiday and two birthdays to plan and execute. However, this year was to be particularly busy since we decided to squeeze a marathon, 8-day vacation to Southern California right in the middle of it all. Every time I thought about everything I needed to do this month to get ready for Logan's family party, Valentine's Day, and Lia's family and friend party, plus all of the preparations required to go on this trip, I would get overwhelmed. And then when I would think about how exhausting and difficult it was going to be to travel with three young children and do Disneyland and Sea World with a crawling baby and temperamental toddler who would be sleeping in the same room for seven nights, I would just want to fast forward over the entire thing. Little did I know that this month was about to get even crazier...
Seven days before we left on our trip, my dad and I stopped by our rental house to check on a problem that my renter had called about. Apparently they had not lifted up the bath mat that was laying right next to the shower in the master bathroom for an ENTIRE month! As a result, water had gotten trapped under the mat, breaking the seal between the vinyl flooring and the shower. The water then went under the vinyl damaging the wood floor below. Thanks to their negligence, we now would have to replace this section of of rotten wood and the entire vinyl floor which will cost hundreds of dollars! When I informed our renters that this repair would be their financial responsibility for the first time (as opposed to all of the other repairs we have paid for since they have lived in our house from the dish washer to the furnace to the garage door), the husband renter lost it and got very upset with me! Ugh. After a very uncomfortable and icy conversation, we left with the plan of returning to our rental house to repair this entire mess during a week in March when our renters will be out of town. As frustrating and stressful as this was, at least I was able to tell myself that we didn't have to deal with any of this until after we were finished with everything that we had planned for February. And then three days later on Wednesday night, I walked downstairs to my basement to get something and stepped onto carpet that was saturated with water...
Oh no.
Yes, you read right. Wet carpet. I was so confused. I immediately lifted up my foot to touch a very wet sock and then got down on my hands and knees and immediately smelled a strong odor of mildew. My heart just sunk. I ran upstairs and woke up a sleeping Ron who then came downstairs with me to rip back the carpet. We not only found wet carpet and wet carpet pad everywhere, but were blown away by the immediate strong moldy smell that took over the basement in minutes. It was awful. So after Ron went back to bed, I got on the phone at almost 10 p.m. to call my insurance company to open up a claim on our house and start the stressful, time consuming process of trying to figure out how I was going to attempt to fix this massive problem when we were leaving three days later on our trip. After an awful night's sleep on Wednesday night, I spent SIX hours on Thursday talking to insurance agents, calling plumbers and water damage restoration companies, and answering the door all while I was supposed to be working on getting ready to leave on vacation. After an exhausting morning, I finally got my babies down for a nap and sat down for my lunch at 2 p,m. Throughout the course of the morning, I had learned that the damage had been caused by ground water which meant that our insurance company would NOT pay for any of the repairs! The ground water had come from a heavy rainstorm the previous week that had drained into our crawlspace and flowed through a crack in our cement foundation right into our basement floor. Although a man had ripped out the saturated insulation, sheet rock, molding, and carpet pad and set up an industrial-sized hepa filter, dehumidifier, AND fan (that were so loud you could hear them two stories up even when the basement door was closed) for six days, we still needed to fix this drainage problem before fixing the hole in the wall and the carpet because it was just going to happen again one day. So, almost $1,000 later, I said good bye to the man from the water damage restoration company and collapsed at my kitchen table grateful that this problem had been discovered before we left, but totally stressed out about how this problem was going to be fixed and how much it was going to cost us upon our return.
And so the girl who usually freaks out if she leaves on vacation with a single light on in her house gets to depart tomorrow for a marathon 8-day trip with three massive machines blowing in her basement and a huge problem to deal with when she gets home. And this is my life right now...
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