When it rains it pours!!!

Tuesday night we went out to dinner with the kids at Angel's diner. On the way home, dark clouds started rolling in. There was one heck of a good storm coming and it was heading right for us. We got home while it was still just drizzling, but by 7pm it was dark as midnight outside. Then the rain started...it was pouring...I've never seen anything like this in my life. People who couldn't care less about a storm were shaking in their boots. The kids were terrified and I was certain our house was going to blow away. There were golf ball sized hail stones and tornadoes just in the next city.

We escaped easy, unlike some other unfortunate people.

Sitting in the basement watching TV, I heard water...Ryan muted the show and I could right away tell that the water was in the chimney. THERE'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE WATER IN THERE! Next words out of my mouth "GET THE CAMERA!!!" I knew right away this was going to be a case for insurance.

Fast forward 15 minutes...water is pouring out of the fireplace...black, sutty, rusty, water. All our bath towels are ruined from trying to stop the water from getting on to the WHITE carpet, to little avail.

I walk across the rec room and feel water on my feet....I look down, the carpet is soaked and it a good 5 feet from the fireplace...another leak! I go to turn on another light...more water...again far from the fireplace. We start looking around the baseboards and find more water...a large puddle that I can honestly say was deep, right beside my new sewing desk.

Fast forward two hours... my grandparents are here helping to clean up all the water. The carpet is torn us because there is simply no other way to stop the water from spreading then to put towels everywhere. Another hour later the rain is stopped and the leaks are pretty much stopped too. We have cement floor in our basement and soaked furniture. But like I said...we got off lucky.

Later we realized that the window in our room leaked too...hardly anything but still needs to be fixed as did the roof above our room.

Insurance has been out, but we have been informed that while there will be "some" coveraged, most of it will be on us to replace/repair...including the chimney and fireplace, foundation, window and roof. They will give us new carpet and probably towels, possibly the one desk will be replaced. This will be argued...I understand that foundations are not covered by any insurance companies in Ontario...but what about windows and roofs. If you know me at all, you know this won't just be let go.

I'll keep everyone updated with insurances' decisions.

In all the hubub, I stopped taking pictures...but I have a few of the basement and fireplace and puddles....




This is in front of our fireplace when we first noticed the water coming out. The cardboard keeps the cold air from coming into the basement in the winter.

You can see the water is already pouring over the edges of the fireplace stones. All those towels are destroyed now. The stains on the white carpet...that's nothing compared to what it looked like when we pulled it up.

This is the huge deep puddle beside my sewing desk. You can't really tell from the picture since the box is still in it, but the puddle is about 3feet wide and a foot and a half across....disgusting dirty water.







This is just after we started taking up the carpet. That's my 77 year old grandmother helping us. You can kinda tell, where she is standing is all one big puddle...the only reason the under padding that you can see is not wet is because we tore it up before the water soaked it through completely!