Kitchen Disaster

Ah we made it home from a wonderful Christmas vacation at the ol' parents home in Sunny California. It was a grand vacation filled with memories of Disneyland for the kids and tons of family time with the grandparents and Aunts and Uncles.  Then we came home last night and found water seeping from our dishwasher all over our kitchen floor.   So yeah, not a fun surprise to come home to.  We even remembered to turn off our water before we left and turn down our water heater to vacation mode. So we waited around most of today for our insurance company to call us back so we could figure out what to do.  I should have called the plumber apparently, but wanted to be sure.  So our insurance company sent out a company that handles water clean up.  They came out at approximately 7 PM on Friday night (tonight) and started ripping up our flooring. They removed all of the flooring that had water under it, which included all of our kitchen flooring, some of the eat-in-kitchen flooring and said we'd have to remove all of the china from our china cabinet in the formal dining room because they will come back on Monday to remove more flooring. :( 

Great picture of our kitchen right? See that big metal thing? That's the Hepa filter. See the big metal thing in the background? That's the moisture machine that dries out the flooring.  The two green bins are the Christmas decorations we just packed up and put away to block off the kitchen from the kids coming in.

The table in the foreground is to block the kids from entering from the other side.  See the plastic tube? That's on the spot where they found MOLD!!!  The scary 4 letter word no home owner wants to hear.  The tube running into the sink is where they drain the moisture.  So yeah, the company that came out, said the water damage near the dish washer may be a longer problem of a slow leak that went down into four layers of flooring causing mold to grow underneath.  They are going to return on Monday with "more guys" to remove 4 more layers of flooring (Yah for more square footage!)  But seriously, they said we will be without a kitchen all next week. Our refrigerator will be relocated to our dining room, our stove will be outside, and we will have no kitchen water.  Guess we will be eating on paper plates and living on microwave meals and cereal. The kids will think it's a picnic for sure!

Here is the view of our "Craft Room / Eat-in-kitchen." The kids can still go into this room even though the floor is moist.

So our kitchen will look like this over the weekend, until the guys come on Monday to remove more flooring. In the meantime I guess we will be floor shopping with three children over the weekend and keeping them outside as much as possible.

So yeah I'm not terribly excited to be back home at the moment and wish there was someway we could fly back to Grandma's house.  We'll keep you posted as the work comes along and of course hopefully we'll have some nice new flooring to share, sans the mold!  

Have a great night!  

xo

Cathleen