Time again for another update to explain the dearth of postings in the last few weeks. I usually have 3 or 4 in the pipeline in various stages of completion. Due to circumstances around the house, I have burned through my backlog.
In late January we noticed that our semi-flat roof over our bedroom was leaking due to ice dam build-up. It was leaking in the doorways of our closets, through to the basement where Zay sleeps. We called a roofer and put buckets down to catch the drips. The roofer said the ice dam in the gutter was likely backing up and causing the problem (there was over a foot of ice in the gutter and icicles hung down to the ground).
On a Friday we had a service come out with a device that used steam to cut up the ice and open up a downspout so melting ice and snow had somewhere to go.
Little did we know that that somewhere was into our bedroom ceiling.
At 2AM that night, Lynn and I were awoken by a dripping sound in our bedroom, not in one of the buckets in the closet. The drip became louder and I saw it was coming through the ceiling at the foot of our bed.
As I got up and came around the end of the bed, a whole section, about 3x8 feet, along with 5-10 gallons of ice water and soggy insulation, came crashing down on my head.
As I scrambled to pick up pieces of plaster and dry wall, I slipped and mashed my little toe, dropping a large chunk of plaster on my bare foot, cutting it.
I was drenched to the bone and went to our bathroom and shivered uncontrollably for 10 minutes while Lynn began cleaning up and throwing towels down.
She would have her first student at 8:30AM, so we spent the rest of the night cleaning up as best we could, dissembling our bed to get the now wet rug out from under it.
Alicia slept in her crib next to the foot of the bed where the ceiling had opened up, but the opening did not reach her crib. She was standing there looking at the hole and listening to Mommy and Daddy yell and whine. We took her out of the crib, changed her diaper, and she went to sleep around 3AM in a chair in our family room.
I went downstairs to see what was coming through into Zay’s room, and placed a bunch of buckets and a cooler to catch the water dripping through the ceiling tiles.
He didn’t wake up until later in the morning.
About 8AM, just as we were finishing up with our cleaning, Alicia woke up, so I stayed awake to watch her as Lynn taught. I was awake until midnight that night.
About 9AM I called our insurance company and they were great. They sent out a ServPro team and they pulled down about half of the ceiling in our bedroom and about 10 ceiling tiles in the basement.
They then taped 5 pads onto the floor and hooked them up to a device that pulled the water out of the hardwood floor, and they put 4 heavy duty fans to move air around our bedroom and Zay’s room in the basement.
Lynn now sleeps on an air mattress in Alicia’s bedroom, with Alicia (it got her out of her crib at least) and I’m sleeping on another air mattress in the basement with Zay. This we will do until the weather warms up and they can replace the roof (we had an $800 repair done to the roof so that it stopped leaking; turned out it wasn’t just ice dam backing up, but the roof itself was leaking as well) and we can fix the ceiling in our bedroom.
Bills so far: $800 to repair roof, $1800 for steaming the ice off, and $4200 for ServPro. Insurance gave us $1800 to repair the bedroom, but will likely pay nothing to replace the roof (normal wear, not an event covered by insurance) which will be anywhere from $4000-$7000.
Consequently, I have not had much time to ruminate about the past, when the future is in flux.
