Water Damage Isn’t Fun

Water Damage Isn’t Fun – Part 1

What the heck is going on with our floors?! If you’re a loyal member of my IG stories fam, you may have already learned that we had water damage in our house on Super Bowl weekend. In short: water damage isn’t fun. In fact, it sucks. If you’ve never been through it, you may find yourself wondering, “What happens when you have water damage?” For those that weren’t living in the moment with us, here’s the rundown:

On Saturday morning we woke up to let Wylie out and noticed water all over the 1st story floors. The water was covering the entryway, bathroom, and parts of both living areas. It also had leaked over to our bar/peninsula and into the closet under the stairs, therefore reaching our kitchen cabinets. Since it was early in the morning, we can only assume the water had leaked sometime overnight and had been sitting on our floors for hours. We (and by we, I mean my wonderful husband) spent the next few hours soaking up the water and placing giant rental floor fans from Home Depot around the house to try and dry it up. An emergency plumber came out and found a clog in the pipes just outside our front door, on our property.
*This is important because apparently, if it hadn’t been on our property and was rather part of the public lines on the street (despite causing damage in our home) there’s a good chance insurance wouldn’t have covered it. If it’s part of the public lines, often times insurance will say it’s a public problem (Enter shocked and annoyed face here). My tip to anyone on the market for a new home is to make sure you have your lines inspected before purchasing. If there’s a clog, which is commonly caused by branches and debris, you can at least ask that the seller pay to clean it out. We had our home inspected with a fine-tooth comb, but never thought about the plumbing lines.

This all happened on a Saturday, and it took until the next Friday to finally get the ServePro (mold and contamination team) out to rip up the flooring and clean up the space. So, until then, the floors had still been sitting with water trapper underneath. We did our best with the fans, but there’s just no way they’re able to dry up all of the water. ServePro confirmed that the majority of the laminate floors would need to be replaced, but the tile in the bathroom and kitchen were fine because tile withstands all (much to my dismay – that tile will not be staying, it’s ugly). They began ripping up all of the flooring and also determined that the baseboards and some of our drywall on major walls would need to be replaced. They set up massive fans for 48 hours to dry up the space (pretty much our entire first floor). It sounded like a hurricane all weekend long – I couldn’t even hear when someone knocked on the door or rang the doorbell! It was quite a sight:

Our insurance adjuster was finally able to come see us that same Friday. He suggested that we not only replace the floors, some areas of drywall, and baseboards, but also remove the carpet on the stairs, get a new couch, and replace some of our kitchen cabinets. But here’s the fun (re: not fun) part: our insurance claim will only provide us with $10k for damages and repair, despite these fixes costing much more. I mean, new kitchen cabinets?! That’s about $10k+ alone. You see, while you may have insurance that covers say $500k in damages, each “problem” is categorized and itemized. So a backup in the lines is listed in our contract and only gives us $10k max. If the line had actually broken, we would’ve received up to $30k, because that’s what our coverage is listed as for that type of damage. So, different problems give you different coverage. This was news to me, as this is my first time ever using insurance for something big like this. 

My advice to you is to read the fine print in your coverage docs and make sure you agree with the amounts your agent is giving you. Ours had actually increased our coverage for a backup from $5k to $10k because he knows from experience that the typical $5k agents will give you is just not enough to repair and restore due to damages. So, I guess we’re lucky he thought of that for us ahead of time. But looking back, I’d recommend increasing that to $20k+ if possible – water damage can be incredibly expensive (as you’ve learned here). ServePro cost us $4k, which leaves us only $6k (assuming our quotes meet or are higher than the $10k max, otherwise we’ll only get the $ from insurance that covers our restoration quotes) to work with for all these repairs. WOOF.

So here we are now, a week later, and our home has gaping holes in the walls, concrete flooring, and the paint we already paid a pretty penny for has been compromised in a few spots. JOY! I’ll keep y’all posted throughout the flooring process and how we tackle all of the hurdles life just threw our way, because water damage isn’t fun, and hopefully our struggle can help someone, somewhere avoid it. If you have any suggestions for affordable flooring/local companies (or heck, anyone who wants to collab on some new floors with me) let me know in the comments below. One can dream…

All is fair in love, war, and reading the fine print before signing,