The Flood

It seems like since mid-January we haven't had a regular week of school. There have been visitors, colds, trips to the beach and a general malaise that has interrupted our schedule consistently. But I was sure that would turn around this past week. Sam just turned 6 and celebrated with her first slumber party (just two kids), Spring is around the corner and the weather is great, and all the visitors, people and sicknesses alike, have left town. It’s a peaceful Tuesday morning, usually a day Sarah would teach but she’s taking one more day off to make sure Baby O is all better, and I decide we should do our morning schooling downstairs instead of upstairs in the school room.

As it turns out, it was a Very. Bad. Choice. Had we gone upstairs at 8:30am we would have noticed the girls’ toilet overflowing but as it was, we didn’t notice it until 10:30 when the water started pouring out of the ceiling in the family room. It came first out of the ceiling fan and then out of a smoke detector about 10 feet away. The fire alarms went off and the girls ran off screaming in excitement. I remember starting at the fan and the water pouring out and thinking “this is really happening? Really? Maybe it’s a dream…no, it’s not a dream.”

I grabbed the file in the kitchen cabinet that has all of our receipts and found the plumber’s number.

“Blaine, it’s Erin Freeman, you came to my house a few months ago. Water is pouring out of my ceiling! What do I do?” I yelled over the sound of the screeching fire alarms.

“You have to turn off the water. Go outside”

“I know where it is but not what to do! Oh my god, oh my god.” I ran outside and opened the lid to the water meter. “Okay, what do I do?”

“There should be two overlapping valves with smaller holes in them. Turn the top valve so that the two holes are aligned. That will turn the water off.”

“Okay, I see it. Kids, out of the street! I can’t turn it. It won’t move! Clockwise or counterclockwise?” The panic was setting in as the water was still pouring out of my ceiling.

“Not sure, either way.”

“Oh my god, water is everywhere in the house and I can’t turn this. What do I do?”

“Go get a wrench and a screw driver and I’ll walk you through how to make a tool to turn it off.”

I ran in the house, grabbed a few tools, including pliars, and ran back out. I tried the pliars first and it worked, it finally turned.

“Okay Blaine, that worked.”

“The water that is in the ceiling is going to keep pouring out for awhile, I’ll be there in 30 minutes.”

My poor girls, they thought this was the most exciting thing in the world and all I could think was how much money this was going to cost us and would we still be able to sell the house and build a new one.

“This is not funny girls! We may not get to move to the beach now.” I was freaking out and that seemed to shut them up temporarily.

After calling Jim at work I figured out how to turn off the smoke alarms – it’s actually quite simple, you just climb a frickin ladder and yank them out. The decibel level dropped dramatically as did my blood pressure. I threw every towel we owned on the floor, moved the couch out of the way, put a few pots under the waterfalls and waited for Blaine.

I was thinking burst pipes so I was quite relieved to learn it was an overflowing toilet, a relatively quick fix other than for the damage caused. I called our insurance company and within an hour my doorbell was ringing. First came the disaster clean up company followed by the industrial strength cleaning company who bagged and tagged anything and everything that got wet, including kids shoes, clothes, couch cushions, rugs, pillows and so on. I felt like I was in that scene in E.T. the movie where various government agencies descend upon the house in hasmat gear and set up a major quarantine area lest the alien was toxic or something. People just kept showing up in gloves and masks and talking in code. The girls and I walked around in a zone watching the various goings on.

The final workers didn’t leave until 8pm that night. They had ripped out the carpet, vanity, sink, tile and wainscoting upstairs. They tore out the drywall and took down the ceiling fan and pendant light downstairs. They installed 3 large blowers to suck out all the humidity, which were quite loud and smelly. We made a decision to leave town, back the beach we went. So much for getting in a regular week of schooling.