Silver Linings

Everything is dried up. I have 4 rooms where the floors are cut up and ruined. Hopefully that will be fixed by Christmas, but we're still warm and comfortable until then; just living with a little subfloor (funny, in my last house our dining room was only subfloor for at least the first 2-3 years that we lived there, and it didn't seem like such a big deal. Goes to show how our expectations paint things, doesn't it?). Good things can come out of bad/annoying/inconvenient things, though.

1. Our wonderful, beloved wood laminate that we were SO excited about when we were building isn't made anymore. Which means that we get to go pick a new style, hopefully something we'll like at least as well. The good? The original installers did a pretty crappy job, and the new guys will probably do it right. Also, there are new-fangled kinds out there that look even more "real", and we get a pretty good allowance from insurance.

2. A reminder that stuff is just stuff. I thought I'd be so sad to see the floors get sawed and pried and hacked away. But it really wasn't a big deal. My family is safe and healthy and warm, and no less so because our "stuff" has been damaged.

3. I'm not so stressed about keeping it mopped because, HEY, they're about to tear all of it up, anyway!

4. We can live with only one bathroom for awhile. Good to know.

It's raining, it's pouring

Last Tuesday night I had a suddenly horrible sore throat. The next day I progressively died. It felt like it, anyway. I suffered through for a couple of days, and finally went to the doctor to confirm that I had strep throat. That was a firsttime experience for me, and a fun one at that.

By Friday afternoon the antibiotics were doing their job and my fever had broken, so I was feeling somewhat human again. Saturday I was even better. We needed food, badly, so off we went to Winco. When we got home at about 9:30pm, I opened the refrigerator to discover ice cream melted all over the place, and everything thawing out. The freezer wasn't working, and neither was the refrigerator! Of course. Yay. Matt looked behind the fridge and since we don't know anything about anything without a keyboard, he didn't find much except a bit of water.

So we made ourselves busy little bees and Matt carted the frozen stuff to his parents' across town to put in their chest freezer (we HAVE to get one) and we put everything else in coolers. Good thing it's cold outside, huh? We were done with that by about 11:30, and the refrigerator/freezer started again. Of course.

A little while later we headed to bed, and on a hunch Matt checked the bedroom carpet along the wall that our bedroom shares with the kitchen. TOTALLY SOPPING WET. Apparently there was more water than it looked like. The refrigerator had been leaking who knows how long, sending water who knows where. We were up til 5am using every towel in the house and every ounce of our energy to sop up what water we could.

Over Sunday we decided to call the insurance company, which I did Monday morning. They said to call disaster cleanup to come evaluate (PuroClean in Boise, by the way, has my recommendation. That is, until they come later this morning to rip up floors in 4 rooms of my house, but I'm getting ahead of myself). They came out right away. Apparently the wood laminate flooring that I love SO much compounded the problem, and it's holding water underneath it in the kitchen. The only way to dry it out is to take the flooring up, and according to their futuristic doohicky, it's wet along the long wall in the kitchen and about 3 feet out. Chances are they can't put it back together, even if none of the pieces are water damaged, which means that the whole 1/3 of my house that's in laminate will have to be replaced because they don't make the pattern we picked (and dearly love) when we built the house.

Not only that, but the laminate acted as a perfect plasticy channel for the water to ride along, right into the laundry room and master bathroom and under the vinyl (which we also love. We're weird about our flooring). Soaked underneath. Wet subfloor is not good. You guessed it, they have to peel it up, and it will have to be replaced.

As for the carpet in the bedroom, they should be able to just take up the corner of the carpet to dry everything out, and then put it back when it's dry.

So in about an hour, my floors will be destroyed and they'll leave fans to run continuously for 2-3 days. Fun times.

Oh, and the fridge stopped working again. Then started again. It only works if you turn it WAY up, then it freezes everything. It's probably 10 years old, and sealed in the back of course which apparently makes repairs more expensive.

Insurance deductible (no complaining here, I'd rather pay a few hundred than a few thousand to fix this mess) plus new refrigerator = my family crammed into a tiny sedan for that much longer, because there goes all the money we've been squirreling away toward a down-payment.

But through it all, I feel strangely grateful. Things could be SO much worse. We have great insurance. And thank goodness we've been able to put that bit of money back, because any other year in our marriage, this would have been totally catastrophic for us.

God is good.