In the past 4.5 weeks, we have had three (three!) house-damaging water incidents in our home...and I have to say that I'm rather tired of it, and tired, too, of shelling out all of the money that's been flying out the door in order to take care of the issues.
First we had the toilet flooding issue (see this post) that still has us down one bathroom and minus drywall in part of the kitchen where the dirty water spewed forth through light fixtures below the bathroom.
Second, two weekends ago, while we were at my folks' cottage for the weekend during a horrible rainstorm, we got a call from our alarm company saying they'd received a moisture alarm in our home. So Geoff drove back the 90 minutes from the cottage and found water coming into our basement, down from the window wells and behind the walls onto our basement floors. He spent the next day ripping out baseboards and pulling back carpeting in the affected areas, renting (for several hundred dollars) industrial-strength fans and dehumidifiers, and figuring out what to do with the window wells and eaves troughs to prevent this from happening again.
Then, just yesterday morning, Geoff went down into the basement and stepped onto soggy carpet. Apparently the valve on our city-operated water system is broken and was leaking; it flooded the floor in two different rooms. So more baseboards came out, more carpeting got pulled back, more fans and dehumidifiers got rented, and we're still waiting for the city water people (who have kindly explained that, even though it's their valve and they are responsible for providing us with water and turning it on/off as necessary, this is not their responsibility and therefore will not be assisting us in the restoration and repair work) to come out and turn off the water so that the plumber can come and fix the issue, after which the water people will come back (apparently on the same day) to turn our water back on.
So now all three floors of our house are affected and awaiting repair. Toilets, bathroom flooring, drywalled areas, carpeting, baseboards, etc. We have already spent close to $2,000 just in insurance deductible (only for the toilet issue) and renting equipment repeatedly to dry our place out. And that doesn't even cover the cost of any of the actual repair work that will need to happen.
And now we're thinking that we're going to need to invest in a $1,000 sump pump back-up system. We have a perfectly operational sump pump; but we've had a lot of water/rain this spring and accompanying power outages and if a power outage stops our sump pump from operating for more than a short while, our whole basement is at risk. Great. Just what I wanted to spend money on...rather than on the other things that so badly need doing.
It's very frustrating, very costly, and very time consuming in all of the details. And I'm annoyed because I haven't been able to leave the house since yesterday morning because I'm waiting for the darn water guy to come.
So I'm grumpy. Wising for just a moment that we lived in a condo and paid a maintenance fee that would have someone else taking care of all of these problems.
P.S. The better part of me wants to add that, despite all of the above, we're very thankful that no one's been hurt by any of these three annoying house situations...everyone's ok and we're all fine! My beefs are only about the costliness of these kinds of things and about the amount of time that is consumed in trying to restore and repair things when life is already busy enough.
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