January 7th started out as any other day, I don't even remember what we did. Till about 4 pm. I was taking a nap upstairs, nursing a migraine. When I hear my children and husband screaming for me. At first I thought something had happened to one of my children because I knew they were outside. So I FLEW (yes it's possible to fly) down the stairs to find all my children safe and sound, and my usually chill and calm husband franctically running around. I discovered a flood. In the middle of him trying to fix our 1/2 bath toilet, the pipe broke, water EVERYWHERE! And because grass had grown over the main shut off valve, it took him 15-20 minutes to get to it. Which meant water traveling everywhere. So our downstairs flooded and flooded...
Here's the cursed bathroom...
within about 30 minutes, I discovered the water had traveled to the playroom, kitchen and garage (the garage shares a wall with the bathroom)
Once I discovered water had traveled, I went to work packing up and moving things away from flood zones. It was a tad overwhelming but thankfully all our stuff was safe.
For 1 week we lived with 13 dehumidifiers in the house, drying the carpets, walls and baseboards. It was hard to live with these, they sound like mini tornadoes in my house, times 13. Because their job is to dry up stuff, it made the house super dry, it was hard to live this way. But we did it.
I call this ground zero. This half bath had to be completely remodeled.
For the next weeks we lived in chaos. Then came more chaos. Laying new floors! Our landlord went with tiles b/c he (and I) HATE carpet. lol
During the floor remodel stage, the house became a giant mess. The kids and I lived upstairs in one of the bedrooms. Everything was everywhere!
MESS! With this flood/remodel, we took the opportunity to PURGE like crazy. Neither of us realized just how much CRAP we had been holding onto. So a TON of stuff went bye bye. And it felt great!
While the floors were being redone, we lived upstairs, in the girls room. The floors took about 1.5 weeks, originally we were told 3-4 days. sigh... I have to say, the kids were TROOPERS! There we some complaints, but overall, they did an amazing job putting up with the mess. I'm so proud of them! We spent most of our days watching tv and playing outside. I couldn't get to our school stuff for a while, but once I did, we did school in their room too.
So this is how we began 2017, spending the entire month of January dealing w/ floors and chaos. This is the first trial I can honestly say I did not stress. I had a moment of feeling overwhelmed b/c I can't deal w/ change and mess. But overall, I'm happy to say God gave me the grace I needed to deal with the situation. And it all was kind of a blessing in disguise, because of insurance, everything was paid for. And it forced us to really clean up and organize and PURGE. It's very exciting to have stuff back in order. We are now working on getting the garage back in order and I will do the same kind of purging upstairs. :) I've also been redecorating downstairs, so it's been fun!
Purging and getting rid of crap has left us feeling so much better. And the less stuff we have, the easier it is to clean up.
