Mo Money Mo Problems

Remember when we had a little fungus problem in our basement?


Well, homeowners insurance came to our rescue and hired some great restoration guys to come and get to the bottom of that mess. First problem to solve? Where is the leak coming from?



From a sewage pipe.  From the sewage pipe that ran from our master bathroom down the kitchen wall and out to the sewer.  What caused the leak in the pipe?



Oh, just a half-inch hole that had been drilled completely through the pipe by our home security system installer over a year ago.


He ran the wire to connect the alarm pad to our phone line directly through our sewage pipe.  Silly goose!  What was the damage?


You've seen the basement damage already.  I didn't even realize that there was damage in the kitchen, but for the last year sewage water had been slowly leaking behind our kitchen cabinets, on our kitchen cabinets, and under our kitchen cabinets.


I know what some of you are thinking.  "I ate over there!"  "My baby crawled in that kitchen!"  Yeah, sorry.  But, if it makes you feel better, I hardly ever used any of the things I had stored in the damaged cabinets.  It was mostly pie tins and bread pans.  Pie and bread!  Can you imagine?  Like that will ever happen.  They were really easy to part with.

The restoration guys cleaned, sanitized, and sealed the grossness.  So don't be afraid to shake our hands at church.

So we had an estimator come and assess how much it would cost to fix our house.  And by fix, he meant putting in some more super snazzy linoleum flooring, rebuilding our custom oak cabinets, and searching high and low to find a match for our pretty blue Formica countertops.  And, wow, do those things cost a lot if you hire them out.  Our insurance wrote us out a big, fat check for the repair and we decided to go at it alone.  Because I think we can do anything.

(And I'm sure you're wondering if our home security company had to pay anything.  Well, they have some pretty iron-clad liability contracts all their customers sign BEFORE they flood their homes with sewage water.  But they did pay our $1,000 deductible.  Roosters.)

So we have been very busy and stressed.  Because I am an all-or-nothing kind of girl.  We hired out someone to come and fix our drywall.  And we found some inexpensive cabinets that are a pretty close match to ours at a cabinet warehouse.


We needed new countertops. We don't have enough for stone countertops yet, so we needed a temporary solution. And these pre-fabs were on clearance for 75% off, so we had to buy them all up right then.  And store them in our front room for eternity.


But before we put on new countertops, I wanted to cut down this half-wall that divides the kitchen from the eating area. Some people love these. In fact, I just read a blog of someone who DIYed a half-wall to divide her kitchen from her eating area. But I don't love it! I love the idea of a great room where we're all together socializing. Not being half-hidden in the kitchen. Plus, I want a great big countertop space for hosting and stuff.  So we shortened the wall and still need to flip the two electrical outlets to the other side.




Next we needed new flooring.  I wanted laminate flooring.  But if we do laminate flooring, we need to do it throughout the entire main floor of the house now, because it will be too hard to match up later.  And this flooring was on clearance, so we had to buy 100 boxes and store them in our front room for eternity.


But before we do the flooring, we need to paint our kitchen cabinets.  But before we paint our kitchen cabinets, I wanted to add molding to the top and bottom like the tutorial here.  I love it.  I can't wait to paint it.


And before we do our flooring, we needed to relocate the floor vent in front of the dishwasher to a cabinet toe-kick.  Because why, builders?  Why?


We were lucky because this vent ran over a soffit in our basement, so we were able to just use flexible pipe to stretch it under a floor joist and move it to the right and back a little.




And before we install our new cabinets, we needed to replace some sub floor that the restoration guys didn't install correctly (we were bouncing up and down in a certain part of our kitchen).  And then when we moved our dishwasher away, our copper water line began leaking so we had to replace it with the new, flexible kind.


And then when I did go to install a cabinet, I realized that they were all 1/2 inch taller than our existing cabinets.  Oops.  They should all be the same, standard height, right?!?  So then I had to cut them all down 1/2 an inch.




It's just been one thing after the other.  Our front room has also been our makeshift kitchen area for FOUR WEEKS!  So after two months of having our kitchen torn apart, here is what our kitchen looks like today:



You guys.  It's a nightmare.  We've been without a dishwasher for three days now, and I've learned that I cannot hand wash dishes.  I just won't.  I used to be able to, Jakob, too, but now we just can't do it.  We're learning a lot about ourselves during this process.

This is why I haven't invited anyone over, blogged, or returned anyone's calls or emails.  I've been busy and stressed.  And feeling super guilty.  I'm sorry.  But we're almost done.  We're close.  Kind of.

We're super grateful that we are able to make these changes because we could've never afforded it without that clumsy security installer, bless his heart.  That sewage water was just one of the many miracles we are granted each day.