Coming home from the beach, I was the first person in the house, and I thought to myself, "Man it smells yuck in here!" Thinking maybe a cat had been left inside while we were gone, I checked all the rooms and no cat appeared.
As I walked into my bathroom, I thought it was weird my shoes squeeked on the floor, as if they were wet. On the way back out, it struck me that my shoes should in no way be wet...
I looked into the boy bathroom to find standing water and a flowing toilet. Further checking found that my bedroom carpet was wet to about 5 feet into my room, and Thing 2's bedroom carpet was wet to about 3 feet in.
Dammit!

So, we sopped up the water in the bathroom, tried to use towels to soak up the water in the bedrooms, and decided to call the carpet cleaner people in the morning to ask if they could come out and suck up the excess water.

Monday morning I call the local carpet folks, and his alarm made me concerned, and when he told me I'd need to call my insurance company & file a claim, because he rough estimate without even seeing what happened was $3,000, I realized this is probably a big deal.

Let me just take a minute to express my love to USAA. I love you insurance company! You have bailed me out of a few situations without snickering at my mishap and have taken care of all the details while I just follow simple requests.

Yeah, so called the insurance company & they had a water cleaner upper company out there within two hours. They got to work, peeling back carpet, taking out damaged padding, out went the laminate floor in the bathroom & all kinds of blowers and dehumidifiers went to work drying out the place. The people mentioned that in situations like these, homeowners usually stay in a hotel, and advised that I check with my insurance company to see if they'll cover it.
I figured I'd try and tough it out, how bad could it get?

Well, we can't open any windows, because it'll let moist air in, which is what the dehumidifiers are getting rid of. The fans are hella loud, and the combination of machines heated up the house. We usually keep the house at about 65 degrees, when Thing 1 came home from school, it was 85 degrees in the house. I wussed out and called the insurance company & hooray! Hotels are covered!!!

The four of us and our little dog too are now staying at a hotel. It's not a scary one, the room is a little on the small side (intimate you could say) but it does have a beautiful view of the inlet.

I'm trying to be more positive and look at the bright side of things.
It just so happens that we were getting ready to start remodeling the bathrooms, so at least this happened before we started that project. And I had a chat with the people doing the repair work on our house & we can do upgrades! So, yes, they can put down the tile floor we were going to have done instead of laminate! Yes, they can do the master bathroom too!

Today The Man and I are going to go shop for bathroom things, and check in with the repair people. Hopefully we'll be back in the house tomorrow. Or as Thing 2 says, are we going to the lellow house or the homtel?

This past weekend we packed up our little family & joined two other's for a weekend get away in Pacific Beach. We rented a 4 bedroom cabin that slept all 10 of us perfectly!
Our cabin was the last one before the ocean, so beach was just a quick trip down the trail.

The girls played at the water's edge, spashing in puddles left by the outgoing tide & were chased by waves. One rogue one did sneak up on them and soak them. They thought it was great fun -although both us mom's had a slight case of heart failure. We brought kites, so the boys flew until the wind died down.

I really enjoyed the big family meals we had together, each one prepared by a different pair of people. It was fun to see how everyone interacted. We had brought down Rock Band 2 in hopes of acheiving stardome, but the microphone refused to work, so we had to do without. Because, what fun is Rock Band without a head singer? I'll tell you, not so much.

We're definitaly doing this more often. It's easy to get overwhelmed with responsiblities, and forget to stop and have fun. More often than not I look at the weekend as a time to catch up on sleep and tackle Mt. Laundry.