Part 2: The Aftermath
Saturday morning was an eye opener.
For a brief moment, I had forgotten what happened the previous day – until my sleep-deprived headache kicked in..and I saw the bags under my eyes. Oh, and smelled the damp of the wooden floorboards emerging from downstairs. Thank goodness Joe secretly buys all those girly smelly candles!
I’ve spoken before of that wet plaster smell that brings a smile to my face, as it takes me back to the week we moved in. Sure it was messy, but we were steaming off wallpaper, plastering the lounge, and scrubbing the retro kitchen. It was a smell of progress and accomplishment of owning our own family home.
This new smell is not quite so pleasant. The damp wooden scent reeks of mould, and whilst we seem to have done enough temporary salvation to avoid the initial growth of any, thanks to the removal of the SOAKED underlay, we were now on a race against time to save the carpet.
(I know, I know, it’s not like saving a life or anything, but it was expensive!)
I’d read that the best way to rescue a carpet is to dehumidify the room. Unfortunately we didn’t have a dehumidifier. (We do now thanks to a friend of ours lending us one – thank youuuu if you’re reading this!) On Saturday, we just had to work with what we had.
We raised the carpet, removed the last bits of damaged underlay, took this to the tip, scrubbed the floors, soaked up final puddles, opened every window and door possible to get the air through, and placed a fan over the carpet to try and “move” the moisture – something I’d read about online. It was the best we could do. It was knackering.
On top of this, I was frantically washing towels (after a trip to Tesco – our bulk buying of washing powder last month was a waste of time as it turned to mush in the flood) to stick back under the carpet. We were also vacuuming the carpet every few hours to help the fibres remain loose.
It was boring. It was frustrating. But it was absolutely necessary.
I did have some help from the cat though….
As we hadn’t gone through the whole of the kitchen yet, we washed every single thing that was salvaged. We bought plastic tubs to store them in (lesson learned here – cardboard boxes are not a permanent storage solution) and basically re-organised what we could to ensure that, should we be unlucky enough to endure the same accident, we won’t lose any more essential kitchen items. It’s true that we’re probably going to replace a lot of this when the new kitchen comes, but as you may have read, this has been delayed already, and we need something anything for the time being.
My mum, bless her, rang me from Mauritius to check I was okay, after reading what had happened on my Facebook. The irony of her Facetiming me whilst splashing her feet in a luxury pool whilst my soggy flippers were soaking in our carpet, was not lost on me.
Her advice was to alert our home insurers, even if we decided not to claim. Best to let them know so they can’t later argue that we weren’t very pro-active! Right? An hour and a half it took me. It turns out, not only had they still not updated the records to my married name (after 3 requests and counting) I was not named on our insurance, even though it was me who set it up, and my signature is on the document. Paperwork is truly the bain of my existence.
Our internet then went down, which caused us to panic. We thought the water had damaged it, but nope, after another long and tiresome phone call, our service provider was simply down. Typical.
On the upside, we did all we could and I even managed to get a snooze in that afternoon – I literally went to charge my phone and collapsed on the bed.
You can see from our pictures how much the floorboards in the kitchen have dried out in just a day. But there is still more to be done.
Apologies for the sad and yes, I’ll admit, over-dramatic posts the past few days.
Joe and I love doing our house, but this has just been a week of frustration. I suppose when I started this blog I wanted to write about our progress, and that sometimes includes the bad as well as the good. Positivity is to resume tomorrow, in Part 3 – The Future.
2 comments
Really glad that you seem to be able to make headway with this. I am looking forward to reading part three. You don’t need to apologise for negativity. Karen – I’d be a wreck if this was me. I’m so impressed with how you are saving your carpet and how hard you have worked. Good luck! xx
Thanks Charlotte. It was hard work but I think we’ve pulled it off! Sometimes it’s just to moan though, am I right? 🙂 Part 3 coming later! xx
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