I’ll be honest with you, the majority of these posts are just fluff while I wait until I can actually do something productive to the house, other than keeping the snow at bay. With the water damage, I’ve been held back on working on things until the insurance adjuster makes his final call on things. For the most part, that day was today. As I type this, I’m waiting for a plumber to show up to clear out our main drainage line (something must have washed into the basement drain clogging it up a bit). While he is here, is going to make the final call on our water heater, which I expect will be replaced. I feel so dirty having contractors coming in doing this work that I am perfectly capable of, but I can justify it as it isn’t coming out of my wallet.

So I apologize about not stripping (wood that is — there, that obligatory houseblog joke is fulfilled), not replacing the glass in the windows and reglazing them, not flipping the stairs yet, or not ripping out the upstairs kitchen yet. I’m just as excited to get my hands dirty as you are. The water damage totally threw our plans in a loop. Some good, some bad. We were planning on sanding down the textured walls in our living/dining room and repainting. Now, with it all falling off, someone else can have that delightful job. They will also be fixing any cracks in the plaster. That is a good thing. The bad thing is the first item on our to-do list was to rip out the upstairs kitchen. Being that it is now our only functioning kitchen, it is put off for a couple months.

Any suggestions on what to do? I get lots of people reading these, but not a single comment other than one from Casey.

Here is things we want to do in no specific order:

• Strip woodwork
• Fix cracked windows
• Hang an antique light
• Remove paint from hardware
• Fix some broken parts on our dining room chairs
• Set up a home network
• Gut the upstairs kitchen (on hold)
• Flip the stairs (on hold)
• Remove that huge chunk of ice from the side of the house
• Install some new lights on the front of the garage (keep the bad guys at bay)

Ugh, I was supposed to get pictures of the second floor tonight, wasn’t I? Sorry, I still feel like a semi hit me and I would rather sit here and type than run upstairs and take pictures. What a lousy house blogger…

Ahhh, much better! All sixteen or so commercial squirrel cage fans, and six huge dehumidifiers are now out of our home. Destined for another poor soul’s water damaged house. Good riddance. We almost wondered if we were deaf once they were removed due to the absence of any noise.

Now that I can concentrate without my head buzzing, I can build the damage list:

1. Possible foundation damage between driveway and house… something moved an inch or two, and I don’t think it was the driveway
2. Maple flooring is buckled in places, and almost all joints have raised edges… hopefully it can handle another sanding
3. Kitchen ceiling still has a hole in it…
4. Kitchen walls that face the exterior are going to have to be gutted due to insulation that got wet
5. Stove is DOA
6. Refrigerator works, but who trusts something that was rained on for hours?
7. Lower cabinets in the kitchen are shot… high quality Menards stuff
8. Wainscoting is in pretty rough shape, but might be able to be put back together (not original, so don’t shed too many tears if it has to be gutted)
9. Bathroom in the basement will need the walls facing the exterior with insulation gutted
10. Vanity in bathroom in the basement will most likely be scrapped due to the (once again high quality Menards stuff) laminate peeling off
11. Furnace has been replaced (~$6000)
12. Water heater might be replaced as it was rained on
13. Washer and dryer in the basement might be replaced as they were rained on
14. At least 10% of the paint in the large living/dining room is separated from the plaster and will have be taken off… no idea what the contractors will do
15. Our main sewer drain line seems like it might have plugged up as the toilet and tub downstairs barely drain at all… really sucks when they are the only working toilet and tub in the house
16. Upper bathroom is most likely a complete gut… tile floor is buckled which means it will most likely be pulled. There are a couple large holes in the drywall from trying to quickly fix the leaks. We will replace the fiberglass tub with a cast iron that we purchased a couple months ago
17. Upper kitchen doesn’t have water as there is a small leak (which plumbers apparently do not carry PVC parts to fix). Was fixed today!
18. Our garage is still leaning… any ideas on how to blame that on burst pipes?

Now, why couldn’t a pipe in my basement crack like over at bungalow23? No, it needs to crack in the top most room in the house, above the most critical rooms in the house.

One of the things that helps ease the pain, a new furnace:

Here are some “calm after the storm” pictures of our kitchen:

This is what happens to cheap cabinets when they get wet (sorry for the terrible quality, the light is quite dark and was hard to get a picture at this time of night):

And our living room (not quite positioned how it will end up, just a rough, get it out of the center of the room setup):

Yes, that is a huge area of missing paint. A good chunk of the room could be just like that with a few strokes of my hand, but I’m going to let the pros deal with the lead dust since they are covered by insurance (hopefully).

And here is our terrible back entry way. I’d love to find a way to make this not suck, but nothing comes to mind yet (once again, sorry about the quality, its dark and I’m lazy…):

And here is the room I’m in right now, with the ugly paint and peeling wallpaper border:

As it looks, it is very temporary. I have a nice oak desk (from 1909) that we refinished two years ago that will go in there once the floors are refinished. I have no desire to put it together and then have to disassemble in a week or two.

I need to get back to working. I’ll save the upstairs and basement photos for tomorrow. Hopefully they’ll look better than these as well…

I’m writing this from the prairie of North Dakota. Before the troubles with our new (old) home, we had planned a trip to Casey’s grandparent’s house in Bismarck, ND. That is where we are now, and have been since Tuesday evening. I won’t lie, it is a welcome relief from the constant roar of fans drying out our home.

My last post was posted the day after Christmas, the day we found out our home was more wet than the south coast after a hurricane. That was a day before we were supposed to pack our stuff up from Eden Prairie, MN and drive up. Most (sane) people would have decided to stay put for a while, or at least find another place to stay while the house dries out and is getting repaired. Of course, we were too excited to move into our place, we moved loaded the truck up on a rainy/icy Saturday and headed off to find out what shape the house was in.

Pulling up into the drive way, we see this:

As we walk around to the back door, we see this:

Comforting, right? Just the thing a first time home buyer wants to see.

Walking into the back door puts you on a landing on the stairs that head down to the basement. Directly in front of the door is a wall that has had wainscoting applied a few years ago. It didn’t look like this a month ago:

Taking a left brings you up a few steps to the kitchen. The water flowed in from the upstairs bathroom floor directly through the kitchen ceiling. This resulted in a nice hole:

Looking around quickly in the kitchen, you’d think the hole in the ceiling and a bit of pealing wallpaper were the only things damaged. Look a little closer you’d find the cabinet doors are all separating, and the stove top is rusting from getting rained on.

And another frustrating find was some door hardware we had just stripped the paint off of a few weeks ago:

However, a somewhat nice thing is all of our paint in the living room is falling off of the plaster, all 1/8″ to a 1/4″ of it:

We had been planning on sanding (meh) the paint off of the living room walls as it was extremely textured and simply much too thick. I’m hoping I can literally peel the paint off the entire room, saving the extremely dirty job of sanding it down. Granted this is a few months sooner than planned.

Going upstairs to the source of the entire problem, the bathroom. The day we received the call about this, we had Casey’s dad (who used to be a plumber) attempt to do a quick fix while everything was still wet. The upstairs bathroom had a washer and dryer hookup in it for a stackable, and it looked to be a reasonable candidate for breaking due to the dryer vent right next to it, possibly dropping the temp a few degrees lower than the rest of the room. So that wall was tore out and pipes were capped:

Sadly, when the water was turned back on, the waterfalls in the kitchen resumed. At that point, we figured any other plumbing fixes in that room would require much more time and destruction so he just turned the water to that room off. Problem solved? We thought so. So we turned the water back on and… no leaks. Yay! Upstairs there is also a small kitchen (which will be torn out once this is all fixed, but is rather convenient now). We had the water on for what must have been 6-8 hours and not a leak. Well, just as I was about to go to bed on Saturday, I was walking up the steps and felt something hit my head. Putting my hand on my head, I felt what I expected, water. Ugghh. There was a pin hole sized leak in the water lines running to the upstairs kitchen. Since this was now our main kitchen, we called up a plumber (since insurance will cover it) and he had to demolish some of the plaster (don’t cry, we were planning on flipping the stairs back to the original position, and this would have had to come out anyways) to find the leak. Well, after all that, the guy says he doesn’t carry any PVC plumbing parts (what???) and only installs PEX and copper. Weird.

Assuming I can find time tomorrow, I’ll post an update after the fans and dehumidifiers (hopefully) leave.

We just got a call from my in-laws who have been kind enough to keep our sidewalk shoveled and that porch on our lovely garage cleared of snow. They had wonderful news. Our house, that we move our stuff into tomorrow, now has a built in main floor fire extinguisher system. One of our pipes on the second floor froze and burst, flooding our main floor, showering our house with water. Fun.

On the bright side, looks like our now water logged furnance will be replaced. And since the water lines burst above the kitchen, it received the brunt of it. New cabinets. And since the kitchen is above the only finished room in our basement, a bathroom,  it received the next blast. New bathroom.

Hearing this, Casey went from near tears, to jumping for joy. She wasn’t a big fan of the kitchen, nor the bathroom downstairs.

Back to more phone calls from 5 hours away…