a mess

My last post was on our fabulous long weekend in Chicago for a hockey tournament and then on to Notre Dame to celebrate a birthday. Monday afternoon we left to make the 8+ hour drive back to Minnesota, and arrived home at about 9pm. We were all exhausted but hurried and unpacked the car, grabbed the dog from the kennel and just sat down to watch the Wild game 6 of the playoffs.

During a commercial I ran downstairs to bring something down to Jake's room and when I reached the lowest level my slippered feet went squish, squish, squish. It took me a second to comprehend what was going on...I peaked into the storage room. Standing water. I walked into Ty's room. Carpet totally soaked all the way to the back window. I walked into Jake's room. Carpet totally soaked all the way to the back window. In the 15 years we have lived in this house we have never had water problems and of course it  happens when we are out of town....

These pictures don't quite capture the extent of what we were dealing with; but Pete, Drew and I got busy moving things that we could, calling the insurance company, calling water clean-up companies, and shopvacing the standing water from the storage room-- but the carpet was way beyond what we could possibly vacuum up.

This picture shows the wet carpet and how the water was seeping into the drywall.

Our insurance agent gave us the name of this company who were able to be out on Tuesday to start the clean-up process.

They boxed things up and moved all the furniture out from both bedrooms.

Everything was moved to the lower level family room.

Taking in the mess.

Vacuums were brought in to pull up all the water.

Jake's room after it has been vacuumed.

Next, they pulled all the baseboards off.

And then pulled up the carpet to rip out the padding.

Then fans were put in each room to dry underneath the carpet.

A gigantic dehumidifier was centrally placed. (You can see how wet the concrete is here.) Now we were just needed to wait, with the fans and dehumidifier running for 3 days for everything to dry out.

They were back today to check on the moisture levels and said the drywall on the back wall was still very wet.

They would need to remove the bottom 20 inches of drywall and moisture barrier and then continue to let the fans do their work for 3 or 4 more days.

So now we wait. The basement is a mess right now, the bedrooms are getting worse before they are going to get better, Tyler and Jake are going to be home from college in just days and they have no bedrooms to come home to.....but we count our blessings and know things could have been worse. And so we just tackle what we need to and know everything will be ok.