Learning About Homeowner's Insurance

Whoa, it's been almost a year since we posted anything on our blog. We almost forgot we had one.

Just kidding. We remembered, and felt overwhelming guilt for not updating it.

What have we been doing in the last year? My two best friends got married (not to each other, gross). We went on vacation to Colorado with two of our friends (who are married to each other) and Johnny rode a horse on a trail ride (without falling off). I quit my job. Johnny got a new job.

Most recently, we learned about homeowner's insurance! Why? Because a pipe burst and flooded half of our house. Super fun.

The weather in Tulsa has been totally insane throughout the winter; for example, yesterday's high was 52 degrees. Tomorrow's forecast calls for a high of 24 degrees and ice pellets. Ice pellets!

WTF are ice pellets?!

Anyway. While washing cars last Saturday, we noticed the water pressure was kinda low. But whatever, we figured it was some wacky Claremore thing. Until Johnny went into the house and immediately dashed back outside to tell me there was water everywhere. Everywhere wasn't a huge exaggeration: all three bedrooms, plus the hallway and hallway closet were underwater.

Awesome.

We drove to Home Depot, naively thinking we could perhaps dry the carpet out ourselves. Johnny called his mother first, who is like, our home repair/DIY/diet/exercise guru. She advised calling in the professionals and even Googled someone for us. She is seriously the best.

The first place we called was totally booked for the weekend, so they sent us to someone else. Jerry was totally awesome and on the scene in like...an hour. With fans. And a dehumidifier.

In Lucky's lair

In the pink room

In the bedroom

Johnny wasn't into filing an insurance claim. His reasoning? "I just don't want to mess with it." Well. After talking to Jerry for like...10 minutes, we decided an insurance claim was a better option than paying $1500+ out of pocket for this mess.

Turns out, the nice people at Progressive can't tell you things like what your deductible is. Is that something you're just supposed to know? Oh...it is? Oh... We read our policy like grown-ups, and discovered our deductible was, in fact, cheaper than paying out of pocket, and that it totally covered water damage from leaky pipes, and that it wasn't really that much stuff to mess with.

So Jerry (who is totally awesome) brought by something like ten more fans, ripped up a corner of carpet in Lucky's lair, and cut out some drywall in the master bedroom closet, the master bedroom, and the pink room to facilitate insulation and stud drying.

Here's kind of a rough timeline of events:

• Saturday: Pipe bursts, water floods half of house. Decide to dry carpet ourselves. Talk to Johnny's mom. Decide not to dry carpet ourselves. Call Jerry. Jerry drops off like 4 fans and a dehumidifier. Jerry convinces us to file an insurance claim.
• Sunday: Jerry drops off like 10 more fans and puts up a plastic wall to prevent machines from dehumidifying the entire house. Checks moisture levels, reassures us the carpet should dry in a couple of days. Noise and heat and smell are so bad that Johnny sleeps on the kitchen floor and I sleep on the sofa.
• Monday: House smells like a wet carpet a dog has peed on, because that's what it is. Area behind plastic wall is 90 degrees. Jerry comes by to check moisture levels. Heat and smell are so unbearable that Johnny sleeps on the kitchen floor again. I sleep on the sofa.
• Tuesday: Party at our house, as insurance claims adjusters, Jerry, Jerry's business partner David, Johnny and I all hang out. House is slightly less hot and smelly, so Johnny and I sleep in the bed. We wake up a lot.
• Wednesday: Plumbers come by in the morning to replace broken pipe. Jerry's son Josh comes by to pull up the hallway flooring and measure the moisture. Josh also drops off carpet samples.
  
• Thursday: Johnny and I are watching TV at half the max volume. Animals have given up, are spending almost all day outside. Josh comes by the measure the moisture and drop off carpet samples.
• Friday: Jerry comes by to remove all equipment! HALLELUJAH, THANK GOD. It's eerily quiet. Animals are deeply confused.

Now, the good part of all this is that we are getting like...home renovation. The rooms in which drywall was removed will be repainted when the new sheetrock goes up. The carpet in all three bedrooms will be replaced. (Thank god, because that pink carpet is HIDEOUS and Lucky's lair is covered in urine.) We'll get new flooring in the hallway. All for the cost of a deductible!

Homeowner's insurance, y'all. It's kind of awesome. (Fans are not awesome. At all.)

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How Does This House Continuously Fall Apart?

I think this blog is supposed to be about home improvement or something...

Since moving into the house around a year ago, I feel like more destruction than improvement has happened:

• Hall bathroom toilet is in pieces (albeit because it stopped working and we tried to fix it)
• Half of the trees in the yard are dead (unsure about why this happened)
• A panel from the dropped ceiling in the kitchen fell out (replaced this yesterday though)
• I stepped through the ceiling while exploring the "attic"
• Buttons ate some of the carpet in the TV room
• Buttons ate some of the wallpaper in the bathroom
• The pool has turned into its own fragile ecosystem
• The garden has been taken over by unruly weeds
• The deck has some worrisome boards
• Dishwasher has begun leaking and stopped draining
• Bathroom sinks have stopped draining

How does this happen? Is this just what houses do? Fall apart? This isn't very fun. I thought it was going to be all painting walls neat colors and buying lamps!!

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The Bathroom Saga

It's been over a month since our toilets went out. I won't tell you where we've been eliminating waste, because you'll only be grossed out and it's not very exciting anyway. What I will tell you is that we have tried to solve the problem.

The issue with solving the problem, of course, is that we don't know exactly what the problem is. Neither Johnny nor I are plumbers. Despite my high school shop teacher's best efforts, I don't know a damn thing about pipes or plumbing. (Sorry, Mr. Peery.) Johnny and I, however, do know how to use the internet. In some reading or another, Johnny came to the conclusion that we should just replace the hall bathroom's toilet. He ordered a super-efficient Kohler from Amazon. It arrived, and we stared at the boxes for a week, daunted by the task ahead.

Last Saturday we finally opened the boxes, ready to get to work. After all, we'd watched Home Depot's helpful video on replacing a toilet. That guy got it accomplished in 3 minutes! Surely it wouldn't take us more than an hour!

We opened the giant Kohler box and were greeted by a small piece of porcelain. Uh-oh. Maybe it's from an unimportant part of the toilet,I thought. As we opened the rest of the box, this is what we saw:

That isn't good.

Our new toilet was rendered unusable! Johnny fired off an email to the seller, and we ventured to Home Depot in Owasso, OK to pick up another toilet. Home Depot was a soothing experience, full of wide aisles and helpful employees and best of all, an identical Kohler toilet-to-go kit that was about $100 cheaper than what we'd gotten online.

Back at home, Johnny got to work sponging water out of our old toilet. I kept Buttons occupied; she was determined to help Johnny by drinking as much toilet water as possible.

Everyone was hard at work.

Johnny managed to remove the tank, and the future looked bright. 

It's a cakewalk after this!

Wrong again! As Johnny attempted to remove the bolts from the toilet's base, the rusty old things disintegrated. It was impossible to keep a wrench on them. So off to Ace Hardware we went. We purchased a small hacksaw. Johnny sawed through one bolt and we called it a night.

Yesterday evening, we got back to work on the toilet. Johnny sawed through the other bolt. Surely the hard part must be done. Both bolts were sawed through, and according to Home Depot Video Man, we just had to pop the old toilet off, replace the wax ring, and put on the new toilet. Right? Right? 

Wrong. You see, when the former owners of this house remodeled this bathroom, they grouted the toilet to the floor. No, really. Upon Johnny's mother's suggested, we tried hot water to help soften the grout. This wasn't really moving things along at the pace we'd like, so we again put down our damp sponge and fell back, defeated by our house's previous idiot owners. 

The current plan is to talk with people at Home Depot about the fastest way to dissolve the grout. Is there a chemical available? Should we just start chiseling?

On the bright (?) side, this will probably mean we will go ahead and give the bathroom a makeover, complete with new tile, paint, and a lighting. There are worse ways to spend a summer, I suppose.

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2011 Goals

Not to brag or anything, but I'm pretty good at New Year's resolutions and goals. I set them, I achieve them. Granted, the last time I set them was something like 2007, when they were "exercise 3 times a week", "compete in at least one 3-day event with Moe" (my horse), and "stop moping so much". For 2011, my goal set is a bit different- Johnny and I have joint resolutions:

• Join the local rec center. Both of us are feeling pretty unhealthy and fat. We were on our way to healthier living when training for a 5K in the fall, but my passionate hatred of running sort of killed it. (That and the searing pain in my foot bones and hip joint.) The rec center has a pool, a variety of cardio and strength training equipment, and lots of classes to help us be less disgusting.
• Remodel the master bathroom. Someday I'll take some pictures; the master bathroom is nearly unlivable. The shower does this weird squishy thing in certain spots, the floor is starting to peel away at the edges, the sink wiggles and doesn't drain, the mirror and shelf weren't adhered to the wall properly, and the cabinets smell weird. Since Johnny decided he could live without a $5,000 steam shower, we should have enough to fund the project by summer. We'll be painting, installing floors, tiling the shower area, and replacing the sink. Johnny's hoping to build cabinets, too. 
• Paint and revamp the bedrooms. One of the bedrooms (currently set up as Johnny's office) is a lurid purple color. It also has a very ugly white ceiling fan and light pink carpet. The bedroom that's currently set up as a TV room is a weird beige color, features a multicolored kids' ceiling fan, and worn blue carpet. A fresh coat of paint, new carpet, and new ceiling fans/light fixtures will really make a difference in these rooms. 
• Fix the hole in the ceiling. Remember that hole I put in the ceiling a few months ago? Yeah, we still haven't fixed that.
• Plant a vegetable garden. We have a very nice plot to the side of the house that the previous owners had a small vegetable garden in. We're going to revive it and plant a variety of good things to eat!

What are your goals for 2011?

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