A couple weeks ago Jordan and I both had the day off, which is nothing short of a miracle, as he never has Saturdays off. I woke up with the possibilities floating through my head of all the many things we could do.
Then I got out of bed and the dream was killed. It took two full steps for it to sink in, or maybe for me to sink in. There was about an inch of water on my floor. My first thought was the water heaters. I opened the closet that had the water heaters, and sure enough that was the source of the water. I had a small panic until I realized that it was actually dripping down from the ceiling! I'd be lying if I said my first thought wasn't "Hurray, it's not our fault!" Assuming the upstairs neighbors' water heaters were directly above ours I thought something had gone wrong with theirs.
We got dressed and Jordan went upstairs to ask the people if their water heater was leaking. He came back down saying that they weren't home, and there was a lock on their doorknob. Great, they were moving, so how the heck were we going to get in touch with them? Obviously we're not the greatest neighbors in the world and don't talk to them, so we had no contact information, or even a name. I called my dad for advice and he suggested that we contacted the HOA president. But, I remember my realtor saying when we moved in that the HOA president lived above us. Perfect. My realtor lived in the same area, under the same HOA so I thought he might have the president's number, but I didn't have my realtor's number anymore. SO I called my mother-in-law (who used the same realtor) and got the realtor's number from her. I call the realtor, and he didn't have the guys contact info, but he had the HOA vice-presidents number. So I called that guy and he had neighbor guy's number! PHEW!!! I was finally going to reach the guy! Meanwhile our ceiling is still leaking. So I call neighbor guy . . . and get the voicemail. For real? Ok, granted if I saw an unknown number I probably wouldn't have answered either, so I left a voicemail, and tried not to sound like a bratty neighbor as I explained that my ceiling was leaking and that it was most likely their water heaters.
Luckily we didn't have to wait too long for a call back. Neighbor guy said that he had just replaced the water heaters, so that probably wasn't the problem. I wasn't about to count anything out and thought that we were about to have a confrontation when he said that he was at a family reunion and would leave now and should be there in about a half hour. What a relief.
He got home and said that it was his swamp cooler that was leaking, and said point blank it's his responsibility and that he was going to make sure that we were taken care of. I was floored, 'cause most people don't want to admit to being at fault like that. He was true to his word and got a guy over to check damages and clean the place up. We got the walls dried really quickly and decided that there was no damage in the walls, but the carpet was another story. We had lighter carpet and the water that was leaking was less than clean. To get the carpet dried ASAP he sucked up all the water and cut out the wet part and laid it out in the sun to dry. I was a little surprised he did this when I figured you could just lift it up and stick a fan under there, but hey- he was the expert I suppose.
Once the carpet was dry we put it back in sans padding (since the padding was a lost cause), and we wanted to cover the carpet tacks that were all over the floor so we could let the cats out (they were locked up all day, poor dearies). Overall we were really lucky that the damage wasn't extensive, We were able to dry the couch out and there wasn't any watermarks on it (only one got wet). We moved the DVD shelf out of the way since it was in the water a bit, and there was no damage to that, but it was a pain in the butt to take all our DVDs off the shelves!
A couple days later we had a guy come look at the carpet to see if it could be reinstalled, and taking one look at it he questioned why the heck this other guy cut it out, and said that he could have just stuck a fan under there, (interesting) and because it was cut and it was an older carpet he could put it back in, but there would be seam very visible. SO WE GOT NEW CARPET! I was very much pro-new carpet, and Jordan wanted to just have our current carpet reinstalled 'cause he thought it would be a pain to get whole new carpet 'cause we would have to move everything out and put it back. Of course it would be a pain (and it was) but it's also FREE carpet! Definitely worth the hassle. I pointed out that eventually we're going to want to sell or rent and we would have to get new carpet then, so we might as well do it now while it's free. So that's what we did.
I am definitely for seeing the silver lining in every tragedy. For example last year I got in a really bad car accident and my beautiful Jetta was completely trashed. That sucked horribly, but the car that I got after that saved in $150 a month in payments and insurance. So, I still say that getting in that car accident was the best financial move I've ever made. No one wants a flood, but- I got free carpet, so hurray!
I absolutely love my new carpet! And I leave you with a beautiful pic of Bella, and you can see the carpet in the background. It's a twofer.
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