*I have more posting to do about our beach vacation, but I wanted to get this post up first.*
Click on the photo to see album
The fans and dehumidfiers were still running in our house and we had no A/C or water, so we were at a hotel in the cultural district for the 4th. The girls played in the room in the morning while Mike and I tried to recover from the drive back home.
We had gift cards for Cotton Patch so we headed over there for dinner.
Our hotel was right by Trinity Park so we tried to get an idea of how we could best see the fireworks without going too far. We let the girls stay up late and at 9:30 we climbed the little hill next to our hotel and watched the fireworks. It was great! Once it was over we went back down the hill and right to our room to put the girls to bed. Perfect!
We packed the car up the night before we left, so we woke the girls up early and put them in the car in their jammies. Our first stop of the day was in Shrevport, LA. We decided to make it a long stop and eat breakfast at IHOP. I put the girls in their new outfits from our friend Lynnea and after the girls ate they were allowed to open the other present from her. Road trip fun!
Click on the photo to see album
We made it all the way to Atlanta, GA on the first leg of our journey. We stopped for the night and got the girls to bed as soon as possible. The next morning Amelie decided to use the hotel room as a demolition derby for her head. She still has no safety filter! She hit the coffee table and had a little goose egg going so I had to rig up our freezer pack from the cooler.
She was not impressed.
Then Nadia decided that she needed to pose in pain too.
Once the medial treatment was over we packed up the car.
We headed for Amy’s house to stay the night and let the kids play. They were one of the families in our travel group for Nadia. They are now waiting on a little girl that is basically Amelie’s “hand twin”. We are so excited for them. The kids played and played and played. Mike let the kids take some photos with our new underwater/shock proof camera.
Click the photo above to see that album.
That night they invited another family over with their kids and we all had a wonderful time!!! Mike has quite a few photos on his other camera and I will get those up in a future post. We have some shots of all 10 kids together.
This was the first time that Nadia had a sleep over. Even though we were downstairs it was still a new thing for her to be up in Jaida’s room. The next day she said, “We played some more while you were sleeping.” She was so proud. That just made me laugh. The kids got up and instantly started playing some more. We had a leisurely breakfast and packed up to make our way to Myrtle Beach. We were having so much fun that I didn’t want to leave and neither did Nadia. She kept saying, “When will I see my friend Jaida and Xin again? Are they coming to our house?”
Cuteness overload!! Seriously!
Then her late night caught up to her once we were on the road 🙂
Click the photo above to see the entire album. One de-humidifier and 4 fans can be seen in this photo.
Janis took some in the middle of the night while the guys were working and then we took some when we returned home. At that point they had taken out some of the fans, but you can see the holes they drilled in the wall after they tore out the baseboards. They said in our room the water went up the wall about 6″. When Janis met them to test the humidity in the walls two days after they took out the carpet padding it was 8% in the good walls and up to 92% in the walls of our bedroom. Some of the other walls were 85%. The carpet downstairs is completely shot as is the flooring in our powder bath. We are very thankful that it didn’t get as far as the wood floors in the kitchen.
We have no idea when the leak started. We left for our trip on Thursday June 23rd. Mike’s cousin Janis came to check in on the house on Sunday, but would have had no reason to go in our room or bathroom and for all we know it could have been wet then. On Wednesday the 29th our neighbor got home from work and could see water seeping from the side of our house under our bedroom windows and pouring out of a spot on the corner. He immediately grabbed his tools out of his garage and turned our water off at the street. Then he banged on our door and when he didn’t get an answer he drove over to our HOA presidents house to ask him to call or email us to let us know what happened. That neighbor called me and we immediately called Janis to go over and check. Sure enough she could see that our bathroom, bedroom, closet and powder bath had definitely flooded. She could feel water in the living room also, but couldn’t tell how far it had gone. She returned later to meet Blackmon Mooring’s crew at midnight to begin hauling out the carpet padding.
Thanks to the quick thinking of our neighbor (who used to be a City of Fort Worth Water Leak Inspector) we didn’t lose a ton of stuff. It is such a blessing for us that he noticed. He told us that even though he left that job earlier in the year the habit of looking at people’s foundations hasn’t left him. Praise God for that. The water could have spread to the kitchen and messed up the entire downstairs. Words can’t express how grateful we are to him for just shutting off the water and looking for us later.
We had help from Steve at our church who went to the house to drain our waterbed the next day so that Blackmon Mooring could come back and get the rest of the carpet pad out. Grammie also came out to meet a crew from Blackmon Moorning. Many, many other people offered to help us since they knew we were on vacation. EVERYONE encouraged us to finish our trip and they could help oversee things. In the end it was good that we stayed because they had to turn the A/C off to get the house as hot as possible and we had no running water. If we had left early it just would have been that much longer in a hotel when we had already paid for the condo at the beach.
Once we returned home and checked into a hotel we headed over to the house to see the damage for ourselves. I was very happy to see that it was basically just a giant mess. The workers just got stuff out of the way to get the wet padding out and get the carpet drying. So our biggest job will be putting everything back in it’s proper place once the new flooring is in. I swept and vacuumed the main areas and that helped me a lot. Our DVD holder in the living room and our dresser are the only things that were damaged. Some of the flowers died and I will most likely lose my square foot garden because the water was off and is still off. We had a lot of stuff melt because the A/C was off and it was over 100 degrees in the house for days. Nadia loved smushing around the Costco size bag of melted chocolate chips before I tossed it. Quite a few things in my coupon stockpile melted, but thank goodness all that stuff was basically free.
That is as high as our thermostat goes. It must have been at least 105 in the house, maybe higher. It was 102 outside and we had to send the girls out to play to cool off!
So your next question is: What caused it? As of now the plumber thinks it’s a slab leak. He will be back on Monday with more sophisticated equipment to test. He turned the water on and asked us to use the house like normal for one day and keep an eye out. We all expected water to come pouring out when he turned it back on and it’s didn’t. As soon as I know the results I will report back.
As I said in my thankful Thursday post – my greatest gifts were with me at the beach. Everything else is just stuff which we shouldn’t hold on to so tightly anyway. Are the next few weeks going to be annoying dealing with repairs, insurance and everything else? Yes, but our life is still blessed beyond measure.
Thanks to everyone who offered to help us and poured out their love and time to us. And hey, we get new carpet!
