So who am I kidding?! Of course there isn’t a gnome in my cabinet putting plastic bowls to my leaking dish washer saving me from water damage! Of course I have water damage under my kitchen floor! Of course a plumber who checked twice and the insurance inspector are wrong and I am right! Of course!
No, I couldn’t let it go. The insurance inspector was here with his instruments and didn’t hunt down any findings for water damage, the mystery leak filling up plastic bowls in a cabinet at the beginning of February. And if an insurance inspector tells you everything is okay, you really should let it go, right? But I couldn’t. I called him the week after and it turned out he hadn’t let it go either, the amount of water I had described had to be somewhere. So he sent some guys over with more fine tuned instruments.
I was sitting at a kitchen chair. Trying to be very steady. Absolutely focused on the guy struggling to fit in to the cabinet. Listened to his instrument beeping. Thinking those beeps probably weren’t good news. But it could also be the other way around. Hands together on my lap. Sending positive thoughts to down inunder my kitchen floor. Visualizing dry insulation. Feeling everything was fine. It didn’t help.
- Yeah, it’s wet down here. You have to take out the floor.
There it was. The doom. My worst fears (when it comes to this). Of course. So much for positive thinking. And, there is no way in hell visualizing dry insulation will help on something that’s already happened! I mean come on, my good spirits can’t make a water leak undone, right?!
One of the things I really feared in this whole thing was that I would have to be the project manager. I would have to find the right contractor and craftspeople and oversee everything. I can do it. I can do most anything because I have to and there is no other way, but it’s just so hard and so much work and such a drag when you have to dig in to something you have no idea of. And a water damage under the floor, that’s serious business.
Imagine my relief when the insurance inspector, at our next phone call, told me he would send someone. Really? In a weak voice: really? Yes, his name is Bengt So-and-so. And I just started laughing. Bengt?! The inspector isn’t just sending me someone, he is sending me Bengt who built me my carport three years ago! Is that okay? Still laughing, that’s more than okay!
My confidence in Bengt is solid. He is also a lot of fun.
So, Bengt showed up, crawled into the cabinet singing (I am lucky to be slender!), told me it was soaking wet under it. Bad news. He took out the floor at that spot and started digging out insulation, wood shavings and dead mice. The good news was that it wasn’t wet inunder the bathroom floor next to the kitchen. And it hadn’t spread inunder the kitchen island at the center of the room. But he couldn’t tell how far it was spread to the right and the left of the cabinet. He put a heating fan to the spot to work over Easter and whistled away.
Back he was this week. The fan had done a good job. And now he could tell it was dry to the right, where the oven is, so that was good news. To the left though wet as far as his under arm and some instruments long as his whole arm could reach. Which means well beyond the dish washer. The second round of digging out drowned mice, wood shavings and insulation started.
I was of course upstairs on my couch but I could here him singing and coughing his way through the mess down there. Then he told me (in the most natural way) he had put in the CTR 150 XT to work for some week or so. The CTR 150 XT (if anyone by chance is unfamiliar with that model) is the big gun when it comes to construction fan. It’s a dark orange box and there is a tube attached to it which ends up in my fireplace where the humid air from inunder my floor comes out for further transportation out my chimney.
So, it’s a big water damage, and I still don’t know how big. What makes it more complicated is the fact that I have under floor heating in my house. There are plastic tubes running under my floors, even so where the damage is, just not under that cabinet though. So the last thing you want to do is break up the floor and the pipes.
Bengt tells me he is going to avoid that. I don’t know how he is going to do it, but he tells me he will. So, even though the CTR 150 XT is making quite a lot of noise down there and I know it might be soaking wet all to the far left inunder the fridge and freezer, I feel unexpectedly relaxed. Bengt will take care of it.
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