When Your Water Heater Floods Your Home

Labor Day Weekend was going well…just a quiet three day weekend full of relaxing.

Mabel and I had come downstairs early Sunday morning and while playing in the family room I suddenly heard a rush of water.

“Hmmm…that’s odd” I thought.  I rushed into the kitchen to see an ever expanding puddle of water flowing out of my pantry door.  Then I opened my pantry to see a gushing stream of water flying out of my water heater = start of panic mode.  After frantically calling a plumber (I tend to act like a chicken with its head cut off in high stress situations) as water continued to fill my kitchen, carpeted dining room, and family room, he told me how to shut the water off.  Thank goodness.

BAM:

Okay…so it could have been a lot worse if I hadn’t heard the water heater burst and was able to turn the water off right after it started.  But seriously…no one ever wants to see standing water inside their home.

Being that it was the Sunday before Labor Day, no one was working again until Tuesday.  It always happens that way right?
And the icing on the cake was that our power went out on Monday for a bunch of hours…good times!

Once again…when something goes wrong…a whole bunch of things go wrong.

On Tuesday when everyone was back to work, I contacted our insurance company (I love USAA) and within two hours they had a water mitigation crew to help start drying out our house (all the water had already either gotten sucked into our walls/cabinets and carpets or sucked up from our shop vac (I remember asking my husband why we needed one and I couldn’t have been more thankful that he bought it two years ago!)

Day 1 of cleanup:

Our wet carpet was ripped up to expose the sub-floor since everything needed to be dried out (they were able to salvage our carpet but not our pad).

We’re now completely limited to ‘Mabel friendly’ areas since I don’t trust her judgement in construction zones, lol!

Parts of our garage got ripped out since the flood flowed back there too…

Baseboards got ripped out, 4 industrial fans got set up, and 2 dehumidifiers were placed in the kitchen.

I know it doesn’t look like a lot of damage but there is water underneath our kitchen flooring, in the lower walls of the kitchen and in the cabinet bases.   All the handful of fixes will seriously add up but it looks like insurance will cover most of it.

Big sigh of relief.

We’re on to Day 2…stay tuned for updates!  I just have a sneaking suspicion that it might be a month before my house is put back together.

 Feel like making my day (after dealing with all of this deconstruction/cleanup?  Click below.  😉