Flood Update: Part 2

~Sunday (January 9)~

During the night Zack (one of our cats) goes crazy! He is running up and down the hall, jumping on my bed, scratching at my feet, and meowing very loudly. I’m guessing he doesn’t like the noise. Thankfully, he settles down. Unfortunately, he settles down right in the middle of my bed. And when Zack falls asleep, he doesn’t wake up until he’s ready. So I’m out of luck for a few hours.

I finally stumble out of bed after my less-than-perfect night of rest around 8:00 a.m. (I normally wake up a lot earlier than that, but under the circumstances, I slept in a bit.) I hop into a shower before breakfast.

Thankfully, we are able to escape all of the noise by going to church. Afterward, we came home for about two hours to eat lunch and relax, and then escaped for an hour by going next door to visit our neighbor’s new baby (Thank you so much for letting us visit!)

After that, we attended the church’s annual business meeting. Normally we wouldn’t all go, but we wanted to escape the noise (do you see a pattern here?). The meeting goes rather long, and we pick up Taco Bell on our way home for dinner.

~Monday (January 10)~

Daddy comes home from work just before noon to meet with the contractor (Mr. A). He starts off by taking measurements of the moisture levels. The worst part of the kitchen floor reads 19.8. Normal moisture readings should be around 11 for Michigan. So there is progress, but we find out that it can’t be salvaged. We also find out that the whole wall that got wet in the basement bedroom has to come down. L



The vacuum mat began sucking black stuff from under the flooring. I’m not sure what that was, but it wasn’t very pretty!



“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!” Mikey sleeping on top of one of the vacuum mats in the kitchen.



Mr. A looks under the kitchen cabinet to see if the wood in there can be salvaged. The reading is something like 23. It is beyond saturated. He says there is no way that can be saved. He rips it out to see if the wood flooring goes all the way back. Sure enough, it does. He says the cabinets may have to come out as well as the countertops in order to dry and refinish everything.



What the cabinet under our sink looks like without the bottom.

 

Thankfully, he told us we could turn off all the machinery on the upper level (except the dehumidifiers.) So we had a much quieter night! All in all, this day was rather disappointing as we found out the true extent of the damage. It is going to take it a LOT longer than we thought to fix everything.



The holes in our basement ceiling.



Someone saw this rainbow outside on Monday afternoon. How fitting! It’s comforting to know that God is with us through this event! J



. . . To be continued . . .