When Water Wins

We had a bit of a disaster this last week.  The day started out good. The kid and were doing school, and I had a towel load in the washer, and m blankets ready to g.  I had gotten up early, and accomplished some things. I ran to the library to get The Hobbit to read to my ten year old, and even read the entire ginormous first chapter.  We were ready to eat lunch, and my twelve year old discovered that the carpet was wet upstairs.  The washing machine was pouring out water! It was stuck in a cycle, so I turned it off.

After all of the towels in the house were soaked from drying up the floors, and in the dryer getting ready for another round, we put fans on the carpet as well.  When looking for another fan, we found that the washing machine had poured enough water out tat it soaked through, and was trickling into the garage. The garage ceiling was dripping, the floor had a huge puddle, and even the inside of my car was wet in some places.  I sent a message to all of my local friends to see if they had carpet cleaners or shop vacs so I could suck up the water. After googling what to do, I just kept using towels to soak up the water as they would get dry.

Three days later my husband decided to call a carpet cleaning company, but they said that it was too late. We had another company come out and do an estimate for water damage, and were told $7000!  In retrospect, I wish that we would have handled everything differently.

What I wish that I would have known about overflowing washing machines:

1. There are drip pans that you can buy on Amazon for washing machines.  This may not have helped in this situation, but it would have caught some of the water.  
2. A shop vac will suck up the water, and should have been used immediately in the laundry room floor, and then on the surrounding floor.
3. The water can spread into the bedrooms on either side of the laundry room so furniture should be moved there and that carpet should also be sucked with a wet/dry vac.
4. There are carpet cleaners that are specialists in water damage, and I should have called them right away.
5. Washing machines that are upstairs should probably only be ran when you are at home.  I was at home, but I keep imagining if the water would have kept pouring out on a day that we weren’t, and things would have been worse.
6. Laundry rooms should probably not be upstairs.
7. Our homeowners insurance deductible went up without us knowing, but they do cover damage caused by washing machines.

We have decided to do the repair work ourselves, but it was still stressful, and it still may turn out to be expensive.  Over all, in the grand scheme of life we know that we are lucky. Our upstairs may have a funky smell until we deal with this, and there may be expensive repairs and hard work ahead, however, our family is good.  Our children are healthy, we have food to eat, and we have a home to live in. We praise God for our blessings though we still deal with the mess.