You walk around indoors in stockinged feet, you notice right away when they go squish. In my case it was Sunday morning, and the squishy spot was the carpet by the bookcases in our home office.
The little room that houses our furnace and air conditioner is on the other side of the wall behind the bookcases. The plastic pipe that drains condensate from the AC coils was plugged up, so instead of draining outside, water drained down to the floor and into the home office, where the carpet soaked it up.
We quickly realized the cardboard boxes of files and other junk we keep in the office closet were soaked too, and started carrying everything out to the living room to prevent further damage. That wound up taking a good part of the day. The AC folks came by Monday morning and fixed the problem with the pipe, followed by an adjuster from our insurance company, followed by an emergency cleanup crew sent by the insurance company. They moved the bookcases and pulled up the carpet to get at the padding underneath, which they removed and threw away. They laid the carpet back down and filled the office with industrial drying fans, which will run around the clock for three days.
All of which is to explain why one whole end of our house smells like wet dog, and all you can hear is the roar of these blue industrial fans:
When it’s all over, we’ll get a payment to cover the cost of replacing the carpeting, minus a $500 deductible. There’s a good argument for having homeowner’s insurance right there. Of course now that I think about it, if you have a mortgage the lender requires you to have homeowner’s insurance anyway. But there are different levels, and those are optional, and I’m glad our deductible isn’t as painful as it could have been.
We replaced the carpeting in our bedrooms with laminate wood flooring a couple of years ago, and had planned to do the same in the home office in another couple of years. Reflooring the office just moved from the bottom of our to-do list to the top.
Every table and flat surface in our living and dining rooms is covered with the contents of those soaked boxes, spread out to dry. I brought Donna’s bridge club card tables in from the garage and they’re covered too. You forget about stuff you boxed up and put in closets twenty years ago, and it’s a bit like Christmas around here. Look at some of the cool stuff I found:
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There’s tons more, most of which I’ll also photograph for posterity. No question, the last couple of days have contained mixed blessings. On the one hand, a wet dog-smelling disaster. On the other hand, a treasure trove of rediscovered mementos … and how serendipitous they should turn up just as I’m starting work on a memoir!