The Ugly Side of Owning a Home: When There is a “Leak” Part One

Owning a home can certainly come with its challenges as I discovered last week. To give you a bit of background first, a couple of weeks ago my husband mentioned that he found a small leak in the basement coming through the ceiling.  When he said small I thought to myself “aww man, but it can’t be too major if its not flooded.” When I checked it out, it didn’t look too bad. It was drops of water leaking from the ceiling and I just knew we would need to get it checked out.

Little did I know it would get worse. 

We called a local contractor that we had worked with on several projects before and asked him to come take a look. He thought maybe the toilet above that area in my powder room was leaking and that it would be an easy fix. He came out the next day and when we walked down to check the basement, it looked like this!

What the heck!

Literally in 24 hours it went from a drop to multiple drops and saturating the wall. My floor in the dining room had also begun to buckle and seeping water in between the lines because it was laminate and backed up to the same bathroom that we assumed the leak was coming from.

He said it was much worse than he thought and that I should get on the phone with my insurance company asap and he called his plumber to come out to assess the leak.

The next day…

Around  8:30am, the plumber arrived to locate the leak. Since it seemed to have originated in the bathroom above my basement, and my dining room backed up to that wall of the bathroom, they cut into my dining room wall to locate the pipes that led from that bathroom to the basement to locate the leak.

Luckily they found it pretty quickly! What they found is basically a defective pipe with a pin hole sized leak which was probably leaking for God knows how long coming from the pipe near the light switch. It is shocking how much damage it caused.

The repaired it pretty quickly and left.

The next people to arrive was the water mitigation company that my insurance company sent out.

What water mitigation companies do is cleanup and demo any areas that were affected by the water and moisture damage and put out these huge fans to dry the areas affected by the water. Luckily we had no mold!

SO the guys came in a cleared out my dining room because they had to pull up the floor:( Since it got wet, it had to go. I hated to see that because I love my floors.

They also cut a larger area in my dining room wall from where the plumber repaired to ensure their large fans would dry the area completely.

And guess where all that stuff went that they took out of the dining room? Yep, right into the living room.

They then headed down to the basement. By then, the water had created a little trail around the basement and the carpet was soaked. Water is so scary!

I will be back later next week to give you part two of this fiasco and to tell you my plans, details on the repairs, etc.

Let’s just put it this way…its going to be a busy month moving forward with all of the new design designs and repairs having to take place. I hope that you will stay along for the ride!

Until next time.