Misery Loves company - Home ownership part 2

Last I left off, C and I had just realized that our basement flooded with poop water.

It's after that we ask each other why the furnace hasn't kicked on.  I go upstairs to make sure I turned on the heat.  Maybe I didn't flip the switch or something.  So I take off my boots, before walking up the beautiful wood stairs we installed and hadn't had time to sand and stain.  Strange, the thermostat is turned on.  So I go back to the basement and C and I try to figure out what's wrong figuring the pilot light went out.  We take the panel off the furnace and see corrosion on
the circuit board.  Awesome. Our "newish" furnace is broken.  What about the water heater?  We turn on the laundry sink and see if the water heater kicks on. It doesn't.

I can barely keep myself from crying.  Our basement is flooded, its 40 degrees in the house.  We have no hot water, no heat and no money to replace any of these major appliances.  Luckily our neighbor owns an HVAC company so I go over and knock on the door.  I say "I know its late, but we were out of town when the flood happened we got a lot of water in the basement and now our furnace and water heater wont work and its really cold in the house.  Can you please look at it?"  He tells me he'll be over in 20 min after he puts his daughters to bed.  I'm relieved!

Our neighbor comes over and looks at the furnace.  Circuit board is fried, it'll be about $600 if that's the only problem it'll be a few days until he can get the part and its working. So that means we will be using the fireplace a lot to keep the house warm.  Unfortunately, all the water shortened the life cycle of our furnace by a lot.  Then we ask him about the water heater.  We can't get the pilot to light but after about 20 minutes he gets the pilot to light.  Woohooo! Hot shower here we come!

Our neighbor asks us how we got so much water.  We explain that we have no idea, but it came up through the drains so it must be sewage. He asks what that manhole cover is in the front of our house, and I explained that its an electronic backflow preventer.  Not the best flood prevention system in the world since it relies on electricity, but since we didn't loose power we have no idea why it malfunctioned.  We go out in the misty rain and open the manhole cover.  Everything looks ok, but our neighbor decides to jump down and see what happened.  He jiggles the lever and all of a sudden we see the lift gate close.

To this day we have no idea why the lift gate was stuck open. And the only thing I can say is in the future, every spring, we are going to have the flood protection serviced.  We had inspected the lift gate prior to purchasing the house, and there was supposedly nothing wrong with it, but what can be done? Lesson Learned #2 - inspect/service flood protection every year.

Our neighbor says to call the insurance company because we should be able to get some money to cover the cost.  So after he leaves I call the insurance agent and get a voicemail. Not surprising as its 9 PM.

We light a fire, pull out the blankets and wait until morning to start digging into the damage.

So, below are pictures of the damage.  Mind you, this is more than 24 hours after the flood started.

I promise we did NOT leave our basement this much of a disaster. Everything was neatly stacked.

Notice the leather couches have water marks and are puckering.

 Now, granted our floors weren't spotless, but they didn't look like this when we left. If you look at the wall on the right, there is a water line about 20 inches high.

I took a picture of the house outside... it looked so "normal."  Also notice its snowing out... that's how cold it was.

This is the file cabinet I was talking about. See the water line?

This is the wet bar I was talking about. Water came up through the drains.

More water marks.   

The powder room.  See the floor, with the muck... Yeah.  Nasty.

TBC.

Misery Loves company - Home ownership

The flood of 2013.

I don't really know where to start.  The fiance and I were in Pittsburgh for work.  We had a security system and a flood prevention system.  We should have been golden.

It was April of 2013, Everyone in Chicago knew a gigantic storm was heading their way.  And everyone knew when it arrived.  4 AM Eastern time, I got a phone call from the security company.  The water detection system detected water.  That meant there was water in the basement.  I tried to go back to bed as I was in Pittsburgh, I had to show up to work, and there was absolutely nothing I could do.  I kept trying to tell myself, hopefully there was only a small amount of water, maybe the water was coming in from the window wells or something.

At 6 AM Eastern I called my dad.  I knew it was rude to wake him up, but I was getting worried about the house.  The village we live in had been sending us updates on the storm.  The storm sewers were full hours ago and there was "nothing the village could do."  Turns out, my father was awake dealing with his own issues.  Everyone I knew either had their own flooding issues, or they didn't have keys to the house.

Seeing as we had the locks changed after we moved into the house we never fully exchanged everyone's house keys.  My future in-laws didn't have keys, neither did any of our friends.  (this has since changed, Lesson Learned #1)

So I waited anxiously for my parents to be able to get to our house and tell us the damage.  Unfortunately, a few hours into the day my dad calls me to tell me his water problem is under "control" but they can't get out of the house.  I get these pictures from my mom to show what he means.


The black car is parked in the street my parents garage sits on.

 If you look closely, you can sort of see a firehydrant almost entirely under water.

My parents garage.  Obviously, no way they can drive in the street.  They may be able to get a car out of the garage, but then where?

If you look closely you can see a red car with the trunk open and the water almost all the way up to the trunk.  Basically, it wasn't safe to drive.

So unfortunately, we had to wait longer. By this time the storm had died down, so hopefully it was only a matter of time before we got news about the house.

At noon, I told my boss in Pittsburgh that I had to drive back to Chicago.  Our house was flooded and I don't know how long I'll be gone or how serious the flood is.  I suspected I'd be back by Monday as "I'm sure its not that bad."

And so my fiance and I made the 7 hour drive back to Chicago.  We hit Chicago around 5 PM.  It was then that I really got scared.  There was no traffic, literally no traffic. While driving from Indiana through Chicago to the North side of the city we didn't see a single break light.  Oh jeeze I thought.  This is not good news.  Also around 5:00 my parents made it to our house.  They said there was "muck" everywhere on the floor so we definitely got water, but it "didn't look bad."  They commented on how the basement kinda looked like we just threw everything there when we left.  I was confused, I knew we had a few "storage" areas, but I thought I left everything stacked in an organized fashion.

We finally got home around 6 or 7 PM.  The house was freezing, but that didn't matter we had the heat down low while we were out of town.  We immediately went to the basement to see the damage and turned up the heat.  We put on our work boots and decided to see how bad it was.

The facts:
We had wood paneling in the basement. Not my favorite thing in the world but not terrible, it was good quality.  There were water marks 15-20 inches up on the wood.  However, wood is not a reliable measuring tool when dealing with water.  There was a metal filing cabinet that had a water mark 11.5 inches high.  My fiance makes meade using wine bottles.  We store the empty wine bottles on their sides in the basement.  3 of the "levels" of wine bottles were filled with "water." The 4th was not.  The 4th bottle opening was at 13 inches off the ground.  The 3rd was at 10.5 inches off the ground.  So, we got water, we got a lot of water.  Somewhere around 11.5 inches.

We went into the basement powder room and saw "muck" in the sink as well as toilet.  "huh, so the water came out of the sink..... that means .... this... is .... sewage." Beautiful.  We went to the wet bar, there were standpipes in the wet bar sink.  The wet bar sink was full of water because the standpipes made it so it couldn't drain fully.  Definitely sewage.  There is no way anything could come out of the sink except through the drain.  Sewage.... Poop water.  We were walking in poop water.  We are breathing poop water.  omg. But why didn't the backflow preventer work?

TBC....