Below is a continuation of our Water Always Wins blog. Click here to read the first entry.

The next few weeks seemed to move at a snails pace. We spent most of our days meeting with insurance adjusters and the water damage recovery team that we chose to clean up the water. We received the same reaction from everyone that walked into the house to survey the damage, “Wow, this is a lot of water damage”. Yes it was.

We had carpet in all the bedrooms that was immediately removed, along with several large area rugs that would not recover from the water. In my mind, it was a start. I felt like we had been on the phone and discussing our situation to various people as part of the process…but we needed to be DOING something not just talking about it. Our insurance company put us in temporary living accommodations at a hotel downtown, but with two kids, two dogs, a bunny, and our beloved bearded dragon, I knew there was no way this was going to work for too long. We were all living out of a suitcase and the close living quarters was starting to wear on all of us.

We had industrial-sized fans working 24 hours a day to dry out the walls and sub-floor. While that was going on, the only thing we could do was figure out living arrangements. Every time I went to the house to pull more clothes out of our wet closet, the same questions ran through my head.

How long would we be living like this?
How much longer would these fans be here?
What’s next in this process?

The popular answer seemed to be, “We won’t know anything for another 2 or 3 days.” Well was it going to be 2 days or 3 days? I just wanted firm answers. I needed a plan. I was beginning to lose my mind.

FINALLY, after what seemed like weeks of drying the house out, we would get some answers. The water clean up crew was at the house with some tools that would detect what was still wet, what could be recovered, and what could not. The answers were not what we were wanting to hear. By the time it was all said and done that day, we would learn that almost 80% of our home was not recoverable – and when you add in personal property that was damaged (furniture, clothing, etc.)…we had a 96% loss.

It still blows my mind that a little toilet was capable of causing all of this damage. The house would have to be taken down to the studs in every single room, except for part of our kitchen and a bonus room upstairs. Every piece of furniture we owned was damaged and would be removed from the house.

Demolition would start as soon as we got the approval from our insurance company, movers to move out anything that was salvageable, and as soon as we could figure out who was going to do the rebuild on the inside.

Stay tuned for Jill’s next entry!