Life: Fire and Flood…fun times

So here’s the reason blogging has been minimal. We had a fire in our laundry room. I’ve told the story so many times since it was right before fourth of July and we saw so many people that weekend so here’s my bullet list from that experience.

 What Happened

• The electrical outlet for the dryer caught fire while we were doing a load of laundry. I smelled burning, opened the laundry room door, saw smoke, heard popping, called hubby and he said it’s a fire call 911 
• We were really lucky to have a houseful of house guest since each of us did something that helped minimize the damage
• The firemen were giant and kept saying “you were so lucky” and “this could have spread really really fast” and the best comment “this could have been a good one for us” followed by “the last fire like this I was crawling on my stomach with smoke everywhere and the tv melting around me” in too excited of a tone
• It’s really weird to here fire sirens and know they are coming for you
• The clean up process is insane and still on going (I should have taken pics of that)
• Smoke was everywhere even though we didn’t realize it until we left the house. They had to send people to whip down every service (I had no idea how far smoke would travel -it got our entire first floor and into our vents and I think we caught it fast) They had this magic air filter that we had to run all night that helped but we also needed to get all our ducts

Lessons Learned

• if you don’t have an extinguisher go get one now please, I ran door to door and NONE of my neighbors had one. I swear it was on my shopping list ever since we moved in but I kept forgetting. If you don’t have one make a special trip to go get one (or a set at costco)
• if it’s an electrical fire turn off the power (we were really lucky that we thought to do this it helped a lot)
• electrical fires (or minor grease fires) you can throw baking soda on to try to help, we didn’t do that because the 911 woman would only say evacuate and refused to confirm the baking soda thing
• we opened all the doors and windows and didn’t run the air conditioning (which we couldn’t since the power was out) but that helped to minimize smoke damage. But let me tell you even with our stuff which they sad was very minimal damage the cleanup is not over we had people in the house for a week all day and they still need to clean all the fabrics and floors.
• NEVER run the appliances when you’re not home or asleep. We probably would have lost the WHOLE HOME if we did what we normally do and left while the last load was drying.

 And after we had sorted at least all the appointments to get all the fire related stuff taken care of we discovered that our basement shower was flooding through the walls and floor into the adjoining room. It’s totally installed wrong so if there is the smallest backup in the drain instead of pooling around your feet the water spread through the floor out the grout and through the wall. AHHHHH and we don’t think the insurance is going to cover any of that. We basically need to remodel the whole shower.

Everyone is safe and healthy so we’re incredibly grateful for that and for the fact that our friends were here to help with the fire and to use the downstairs bathroom to find out we had such a huge problem. But we’re quite mad at the previous owners. They did a lot of work themselves on this place a lot of really crappy work. We had it inspected but I think a lot of the problems were deeper. It’s just a royal pain in the butt to take care of all of this on top of the huge cost it’s going to be in the end but we’re really hoping this is the last of major home issues for a while.

We’re mostly back to normal except for of course still having people in and out to assess, fix, and so on. Anyways that’s what’s been going on, luckily most of my customers have been super awesome and understanding.