The Flood

So, plans had been in the making for our friend Brent to come stay with us for a couple of days.  He had a conference in DC and had a light schedule the first few days so we could play and visit.  But when Taylor had to be out of his NYC apartment at the end of the month, Tom's schedule got jostled so he could make the drive with him and the plan included me flying to Utah after Brent's visit.

In preparation for said visit, I cleaned the apartment the day before his arrival and after finishing decided to do another bleach cleaning of the master tub.  So I put the cleaner in, started the water running and left to go into the other room.....where I checked emails, and started to blog....for like an hour.  In fact it wasn't until I stood up and my feet were soaking wet from the carpet that I ran across the apartment to find this.

Well, I won't got into all the ugly details but just know that I freaked out, called maintenance who in turn called the disaster relief truck to come clean it all up.

Know that it included tearing up the carpet, pulling out the padding, turning up the heat and putting high powered fans all through the apartment.  Nice.

 Oh yeah, we moved some of the furniture into the bathrooms and kitchen then out into the hall which also had water leaking into it from my apartment.

That first night I stayed there to sleep (I use the word loosely) where I actually just sat in the sauna with the fans blowing hot air everywhere replaying the entire episode in my mind over and over while wondering how I could make this all work with a house guest arriving the next day.

Well, I couldn't.  So I got a hotel room within walking distance (yeah, Tom has the car at this point somewhere in the Dakota's probably) and met Brent at the airport with a smile on my face and a hilarious story.

Hot cookies from the front desk and a quiet, dry hotel room.

We enjoyed his stay in a lovely room with separate bedrooms, free breakfasts, hot cookies, and lots of chit chat.  We saw a dance concert at Kennedy Center and ate out.  Thankfully he's a dear friend so was completely understanding and even came to check on the apartment's progress with me over two more days as it attempted to dry out.

 It took a day longer than expected for the apartment to get the carpets re-stretched and cleaned.  I was flying out the next morning at 6 AM and came home late in the afternoon after they finally had finished to find this.

 Furniture still just willy nilly and most stuff stacked in the bathrooms and kitchen.  I started moving what I could but it became clear pretty quickly that I wasn't going to be able to finish this by myself   and I wasn't going to leave it for Tom and my parents to come back to.  Hence, I swallowed my pride and called the trusty LDS missionaries who happen to live in the same complex as we do.  Bless them, they were there within the hour and helped me get it all back together.  They even hooked all the electronics back up and all for just the reward of a cold Sprite.  Honestly, I was so thankful they were there and available I could have bawled.  Not that I hadn't already done that over my stupidity.  Could have been worse.  We're on the bottom floor so no leakage into other apartments.  If we'd had anyone under us that would have been a nightmare. Only a couple of our things damaged and nothing major.  Unfortunately renter's insurance doesn't cover this kind of damage (surprise) even after many, many back and forth calls.  Still.  Could have been worse.