Our Home Flood Update

What Happened:

If you’ve been following along over on Instagram, you might already know, but here’s the story of how our home flooded (you can catch up on my “The Flood” highlight here). When we were out of town for Thanksgiving, we received a call from our next door neighbor that there was water running into their yard from our house. A valve under our sink had unfortunately been installed incorrectly during our kitchen remodel over the summer, and it bursted while we were away. It appeared as if the water had been running for up to two days, half of our downstairs covered in almost an inch of water. As you can see above, the floors and cabinets were all destroyed.

What We’ve Done:

We immediately called in the help of a restoration team to install industrial fans to dry out the area. They were LOUD. We had those running for about a week, and then the demo process began. Half of our floors were taken out, and our kitchen was taken apart. After lots of back and forth communication and inspections, we finally got the go ahead from our insurance to begin with repairs.

Next Steps:

That brings us to where we are today. The last video above is what our kitchen space currently looks like. We’ve been working with a contractor to figure out our options and pick replacements for the floors and cabinets. We toyed with the idea of replacing all of our floors, but at the end of the day decided it wasn’t worth the extra cost. The hardwood floors we currently have are really nice, and it would be a shame to see those go to waste. We have decided to replace the damaged area, and refinish the entire downstairs in a stain that is updated and more our style.

For the kitchen, we will be replacing our cabinets and our island. Luckily, our countertops could be saved. The silver lining in this process is that we will hopefully be able to redesign the cabinet layout to better suit our needs. Because we only have open shelving where upper cabinets would be, it’s super important that we have organized storage in our lower cabinets. We are still working with our contractor to pick out our specific style, so more on this soon! Other things that will need to be replace include our insulation, drywall, subway tile, and baseboards. We have a long road ahead of us, but I’m looking forward to seeing it come together.

It seems silly, but it was heartbreaking to see our newly remodeled kitchen torn apart. Ryan and I had put countless hours of DIY work into the space, and just like that, it was gone. I decided that with this rebuild, I wanted to do something different. Our kitchen we completed this year wouldn’t feel the same having contractors do all of the work instead of us. Plus, changing it up gave me a chance to exercise my creative side and look forward to something fresh and new. Here’s inspiration for what I’m picturing for our new space:

Lessons Learned:

Let me preface this by saying: we aren’t experts. This is the first time we have been through something like this and I’m sure we made mistakes we don’t even realize. We did the best we could given our situation and turned to family for advice. Firstly – thank goodness for insurance! I can’t even image this process without it. Worth every penny.

We called in a restoration team because we were essentially in panic mode. Plus, it was Thanksgiving day and not a lot of people were working. We did our best to communicate with insurance and the restoration team, but this got tricky. They weren’t the best communicators, and sometimes we didn’t know if we were getting the full story. It was difficult to tell if at any point the restoration team was doing more than they had to, because they receive compensation directly from insurance. Warning: this cuts into the amount you’ll receive back from insurance. In hindsight, we did the best we could because we wanted the situation to be handled asap, but we might would handle this part differently next time.

Overall, I’m just thankful the situation wasn’t worse. I can’t even imagine how life changing this situation is from people without insurance or without the resources we have. The silver lining is it’s given us an opportunity to redo our floors and design a new kitchen – a process I’m excited to share more of. Keep following along over on Instagram for more updates!