When last we left you...

Site of the day: digg. (A really cool computer news site where the users determine what is important and interesting news)

Oh, this blog is SO due for an update.

I last posted on November 17. Things were being unpacked, we'd yet to actually live in the house. Little did I know that six days later the fertilizer would hit the ventilation system.

With apologies to Ross (since he's already read this in my email to him MONTHS ago) I'll quote from my email:

We moved into the new house on November 19th. On November 26th, in the mid-morning, we had a flood in our new, finished basement. Since then, I've learned a lot about flood cleanup and insurance. Here's what happened:

I was out shopping (it was my annual day-after-Thanksgiving shopping day with my brother-in-law, Howard). We plot a course to shop at all of the places we want that have early morning openings and have special sales (e.g. "free after rebate" or "lowest price ever" crap). This year, we awoke at 5am to arrive at Circuit City at around 5:30am (for a 6am opening, I think - I'll have to check my ads to verify the time). The point is, we got up, we showered, and we drove very early to hit the first of our stores. We were about 15th in line to enter, and Verizon was holding a raffle for people in line, and handing out free coffee and donuts. (I won a folding umbrella).

After leaving Circuit City, we drove to CompUSA, Best Buy, Micro Center, OfficeMax, and Staples (I do not remember the exact order, but it was determined by the offers and the store locations). At Staples, around 10:30am, Lina called me to tell me that there was water in the basement. My shopping run was over (which was really fine with me, since I had purchased all I really wanted to get), but the adventure had just begun.

I immediately called the builder (his number was on speed dial on my cell phone). He said to turn off the water (Lina already had) and that he'd be over at the house to inspect in a few minutes. I dropped Howard off at my parent's home and returned to mine. It took me about 40 minutes to get there, and I arrived five minutes before the builder.

A quick word about the basement: Out basement floor is carpeted with the same carpet used on our staircase and hallway upstairs. This is a nice quality carpet (and we paid to upgrade from the builder specifications). All of the basement (except the utility room) is carpeted thus, and all of the walls were painted and had a baseboard installed (again, except the utility room). The layout of the basement includes a play room for the kids, and office for me, an "exercise room" (extra guest room), the aforementioned utility room, a crawlspace off of my office, a small closet for wiring, a small closet for the water connection, and a full bathroom. Since we had just moved in, there were a LOT of cardboard boxes in the basement, most of them stacked in my office (which was, literally, 3/4 full, floor to ceiling, with boxes and furniture - mostly packed computer equipment, but some magazines and crap from my parents house that I was instructed to remove when we vacated). The kids play room had many of their toys unpacked already, but there were still some boxes there. The "exercise room" contained overflowing toys from the play room, and a bunch of plastic containers (thank you, Target) with clothes and other packed stuff. The floor of the utility room had some furniture pieces (a wood TV stand we did not need, a wood wine rack) and some other miscellaneous house stuff (paint cans, leftovers).

Oh, and the drain opening was in the utility room.

At any rate, shortly before my 10:30 phone call, Virginia came upstairs and told her mommy that the floor was wet in the basement. Lina checked... sure enough, there was a wet spot in the kids play area, a wet strip that went nearly to the spot where the kids toys were. And she could see about 1/4" standing water in the utility room.

When the builder arrived (actually both Seth, the builder's son and the person responsible for managing our homebuilding, and Kevin, his father and owner of the company) Kevin told us to call ServiceMaster to come clean this up, and he got on his cell phone and called the plumbing company to come out and trouble shoot this blockage. I looked up ServiceMaster in the phonebook, called two of them, left messages, and waited for the call back. ServiceMaster is a company that does the cleaning job no one wants - they clean up after disasters (fires and floods) and apparently there are at least two different divisions - the normal home cleaning and the disaster cleanup. Only one of the ServiceMaster's in the area handles disaster cleanup, and my message was forwarded to them. The on-call team called and would stop by as soon as they were able.

Meantime, Kevin had cut a hole in the carpet in my office to look for a drain-trap opening. At this point I was just a tiny bit shocked - I mean, if someone came into your house and cut a hole in your NEW carpet, what would you think? But I figured, "heck, he's the builder... he knows what he's doing... and he can get this carpet repaired later). Kevin was trying to see where the blockage was that caused the backup into the basement. What no one was saying out loud yet was "hey! dude! that's toilet paper and black crap on the floor in the utility room!" That matters.

While waiting for ServiceMaster to arrive, the plumber arrived. Kevin and Seth left to go back to their office (which is just down the street from the house) and they returned right after the plumber. Together, they diagnosed the problem as a blockage between the house and the street. It was not apparent when testing the water flow before we moved in because the water flow was not tested with "solids" like toilet paper, just with water... whatever was restricting the flow was such that water would pass, but the solids snagged on it and caused the final blockage. They cleared the blockage, and we did a test. A-OK.

When the plumber left, I started moving kids toys and boxes away from the wet areas. Fortunately, none of the kids toys got wet, but did not want them to be in the way when the cleaning crew arrived. It seemed that the wet areas extended out from the utility room, under the wall into the "exercise room", and back around into my office area. Unfortunately, the large number of boxes made searching my office rather difficult.

Sometime later, ServiceMaster arrived. Two guys, two trucks, and a lot of gear. I brought them downstairs to the wet area, and we walked the basement... and only now did the size of the problem start to become apparent. They used a probe to poke through the carpet into the pad beneath... and the pad was wet in a much larger area than just the carpet surface. Also, the wet area extended through most of my office... and there were two old cardboard boxes with Byte magazines in them that I had moved from my parents house a few days before. The magazines were destroyed (I was planning on selling these on eBay anyway).

Upon examining the mess, we were told that ServiceMaster cannot clean this carpet. It seems that there are three classes of flood: white, brown, and black water. White would be clean water, like when a water pipe bursts. Brown is water that is not inherently dirty, but has not been cleaned (e.g. rain leaks). Those two types can be cleaned and dried out of carpets and other things. We had black water: untreated sewage... They can only remove the dirty items, dry, disinfect the area with steam, bleach, and antiviral sprays, and hope for the best. This process is much more time consuming and expensive than merely cleaning.

I figured the builder had told me to call ServiceMaster, so this is what he expected them to do... but just to be sure, I contacted Kevin. He had mentioned that he'd pay for the cleaning, but this was not something he'd pay for. He suggested I contact my insurance company. In the meantime, ServiceMaster wanted to know how I wanted to proceed. It being Friday, they wanted to leave some dehumidifiers there, let them remove the moisture, over the weekend, and then they'd come back on Monday and rip out everything. It was my job to get everything out of the basement so they could clean it.

Well, to the best of my knowledge, the phone number for the insurance company was in a box in the basement. So I called my agent to get their number. The phone rang and rang... no answer at all. This day just keeps getting better and better.

It's now late Friday afternoon... I have a mess in my basement, I got up at 5:30am, and I need to get TONS of boxes and furniture up a flight of stairs and out to my garage. So I asked my brother and brother-in-law for help. Saturday, the three of us moved almost everything out of my office and into the crawlspace of the garage, leaving he playroom, exercise room, and some furniture for later. Sunday, Lina moved the items she could from the playroom and exercise room out to the garage or family room, and my brother and I got the rest of of the furniture out to the garage.

I called the insurance agent again on Saturday... this time I got their voicemail, and a Ieft a message explaining my situation and the urgency.

Monday, SerivceMaster returned, and I could tell the guys were afraid they'd have to heft all those wet-bottomed cardboard boxes out of the basement. They were surprised and more than a little impressed to see what we had done... It was still not clear how I was going to pay for this clean-up - ServiceMaster generally deals with insurance companies, and I could not even get mine to call me back. I called them again, and finally reached me agent. It turns out they had taken the long weekend to move their offices, and the phones were just now reconnected. I explained what happened, and they put me in contact with the insurance company and the adjuster. He came out on Tuesday

The adjuster from Encompass Insurance came by, looked at the basement, took a sample of the carpet that was removed, and got some info about the things that were destroyed (the magazines, some wood tables that could not be cleaned by ServiceMaster because the wood was pressboard and it soaked up the black water). ServiceMaster had removed the carpet and padding, several sections of baseboard, and cut up to 1' of drywall off the bottom of several sections of the walls. I was told I had 6 months to make any further loss claims from the items damaged in the flooding, but that since the flood was caused by a sanitary sewer backup and we had purchased the top-of-the-line insurance policy, our coverage was unlimited (after the $500 deductible). I'd soon discover that their idea of unlimited and my idea of unlimited were somewhat different.

I was told to get a quote for the repairs, and I contacted the builder to get that. Repairs would cost $7700... and I sent that quote to the adjuster. He sent me his quote for repairs, and it was in the $5000 range... The difference was "depreciation" (yeah, right! it's a NEW HOUSE for God's sake!) and a different cost for the carpet. Our builder when back to the company that installed the carpet, got a quote on the exact carpet we'd had installed, and submitted that to the adjuster. The adjustor's response was that the builder was overpaying for the carpet, and that they would not pay that much. And that's where we are right now. No finished basement, no office for me to set up my computers in, and a wife who's very upset about all this. Oh, and a garage full of furniture and boxes.

So that's what's been consuming my time lately.

-Jeff