Our Floors

 

Just for the record, a month before Christmas the main pipe exiting our house clogged and overflowed at our ice machine, flooding a third of our first floor.  Ainsley was the one that saw the water first and was very proud to tell all of the 'worker men' who visited us daily about exactly what happened.  There were a lot of blessings in the whole thing, because we were home when it happened so the water only stayed on the floor for a few hours, it was gray water (probably draining from the washing machine) rather than sewage, and they were able to fix the clog that same night.  That said, the water damage to our hard wood floors/walls covered most of our living room, part of our breakfast area, and most of our main hall, as well as damaging the cabinets and walls in our bathroom.  The flooding occurred during the first few days of December and just this past week we have been able to live on our floors normally.  All that to say, it has been a serious hassle!  To dry out the floors we worked with Servpro of Hyde Park (and highly recommend them!!!) and had a series of loud, hot, obnoxious drying machines in our house for 22 days!!  See the pic above and below.

Then when those weren't working because of the thickness and seal of our floors we had to sand the finish off to expose the raw wood and then they brought in these slightly less intrusive machines.  We were finally able to get rid of all the machines on Christmas Eve and I was so thrilled!  Having all of our furniture out of sorts and all these machines really messed with my ability to decorate for Christmas!  I'll admit that I had a few breakdowns over that at the end of some long days but I will say that the guys from Servpro felt so bad about the timing and duration of everything that they helped move our Christmas tree into the front play room one day so that we were actually able to decorate and enjoy it.  I was very thankful for that!

But since we had to sand a section of the floor, we knew that we would have to eventually sand the whole first floor of our house (because the wood floor is continuous throughout) and re-stain it, which ended up being a whole other headache.  Thankfully though we were able to host my parents for Christmas, with a mostly normal house and didn't have to mess with the refinishing process until recently.

At the beginning of Feb, we had all of our furniture moved out of our first floor and packed up and moved ourselves into a rental house for the sanding and refinishing process.  As with all construction, what was supposed to take 4-5 days ended up taking over two weeks and we had to bounce around to a few rental houses.  It was a long tiring process but thankfully our kids stayed healthy and didn't have issues sleeping in different random places.  Ainsley did have a few melt downs about missing our home but also enjoyed getting to have special sleepovers with mommy.  Can I blame my lack of consistent blog posting on all this?  :)

We moved back into our house last monday and the floors were finally cured enough for us to put our rugs back down this weekend.  Ahhhh - it finally feels like we are back home and things are put back together.  The floors look good - better than we inherited them - but still aren't perfection.  That said, I can tend to be a perfectionist at times.  :)  The whole process was a definite pain but insurance has been great and it was a really good learning process George and I as we are about to embark on building a new house!!  More about that soon!  :)