Ken here: So we've been remodeling our house for three years. It has been a cluster, of peanut brittle, or something. If insurance had covered it, or I had found a way to pay a contractor it probably would have been over in about a month or two. Choices were made, and I believe it all went down the way it was supposed to. We saved a lot of money, but the stress hasn't been great. There's a LOT between the lines that I don't go into. We realized after awhile that we had to go to the zoo, go camping, take vacations, etc. If it was just me, or just myself and Angel we might have been able to tough it out and push through all of it, but with kids you don't want them to feed on your stress and discomfort, and so you do things to make it fun, and there was a lot of that. Oh, and we got baby chickens and built them a run during this too. Also I have to apologize that in 3 years we didn't take any proper pictures with a proper camera of this whole disaster. All the pictures were taken with Samsung Galaxy S8s and S10s, and it shows. We never could have guessed everything that would happen along the way, welcome to the biggest adventure of our marriage:
In August 2018 we were getting ready for church. The girls were struggling to find clothes that would fit and Angel was also busy getting ready. So I go into the girls' closet to find a particular dress, I myself in socks, begin rifling through hanging clothes and notice two things at once: something smelled very off, and my socks were soaking up moisture from the floor.
It was a turning point in our lives, a curve ball from life, in the way of life's storms it was a shelf cloud followed by a tornado. At first Angel and I thought our youngest had had a potty accident in the closet; it had happened once before, but the smell wasn't ammonia… somewhere a water line had busted, our floor was flooded, and the smell was mildew setting in.
I analyzed the situation as fast as I could, cleared out the closet floor, threw down towels, went under the house and cut off the water and went to church while we considered what to do because there wasn't much more that could be done at the moment.
Upon returning home we started an insurance claim and proceeded to clear out the closet and inspect under house and over the carpet to find the cause, and the extent of the damage. The girl's closet backed up to our pantry, the nook our fridge stays in, the front closet, and the living room… water damage was found in all of those. We pulled out the fridge and found that the water line to the ice maker had cracked at some point, and had a seeping leak across the 3 rooms. Mildew had set in, and mold was starting to grow.
In the following week we set up the tent in the backyard (thankfully it wasn't too hot that week), and proceeded to clean out all the damaged area and sit on our hands as we waited for inspection and appraisal from our insurance company. Waiting can be the worst, especially as someone who needs to be doing something. The weather was good and in an effort to minimize our time in the house and make the experience fun for the kids we elected to backyard camp that week. Anticipating the impending gutting of flooring we took bedding out of the girls' room, and the futon out of the living room. We began sealing off the bedrooms and closet with plastic tarp, moving the refrigerator into the middle of the kitchen, doing our best to close any contaminated air off from the rest of the house.
Soon we got the news that we feared the worst. The insurance company wouldn't cover renovations. Financially we knew we could take a personal loan and had some investments to cash out to where we could fix it. It was edging towards September, and I figured if I worked hard on it, stopped going to the gym, cut into my sleep, and went 7 days a week I could have it done by the end of October. I couldn’t imagine the mess I was getting into. Enter hurricanes Florence and Michael.
Since hurricane Hugo in 1989 most central North Carolinians keep a wary eye on the Caribbean during the fall. When I was in the Marines Angel and I stuck out hurricane Irene near where it made landfall and were moving out just ahead of hurricane Sandy. Doing measurements and math I went out and purchased as much as I could estimate in needed supplies, anticipating a material shortage ahead of the massive storm. As history will tell, Florence did not impact central or eastern North Carolina directly, but cut south and ravaged our neighbor state of South Carolina before cutting north and causing a lot of damage in western North Carolina along the Appalachian mountain chain and causing a lot of flooding and.
During this time I was working on deconstructing the damaged area. Roughly 300 square feet of insulation from under the house was thrown out, the floor in the girl’s bedroom was almost entirely ripped out down to the floor joists. The front closet and living room went through the same treatment. The drywall of the walls joining the three rooms was all torn out. We ran two dehumidifiers each made for 3000 square feet (many times more than the footprint of our house) as well as an air purifier which I ran in the girl's bedroom.
Queue the 2nd hurricane to hit the Carolinas: Michael. Hurricane Michael blasted the Florida panhandle and made its way north. Rain and wind wrecked the southeast as Michael left a path of destruction. By the time it reached the North Carolina Piedmont it was a tropical storm with winds gusting southwest to northeast around 60 Knots, but this was a false comfort. As it hit the Triad are it was met with a strong low pressure "cold front" from the north west that was pushing winds the opposite direction - northeast to southwest - also about 60 Knots. This resulted in a wind sheer through our area of approximately 120 knots. Wind sheer is when winds of opposing direction meet, it's not a collision, it's more of a tearing that causes a lot of intense swirling and tumbling. As the cold front and Michael ripped through the area trees and branches snapped everywhere, and one huge oak fell across our back fence.
In hindsight we should have called the insurance company again, but we did not. A mixture of emotions stemming from the frustration of being declined coverage for the water leak, and a weird set of emotions in seeing how much worse others were hit, our little bit of damage seemed insignificant - especially since my neighbor and I were able to set the fence mostly straight - led us to not pursue an insurance claim at the time.
I was soon splitting time between cutting up fallen trees and working on the house, and found myself rapidly burning out. I took a break from the house, and then as we drew closer to the holiday season I took a break from slowly tearing out the mess of trees and wild grape vines. Between the holidays, an uptick in work, and the snow and ice of the winter, I didn’t get back to working through the wood and the house until the following spring. With the house we had torn out the damaged material in the first month after finding the leak. We had most of the sub-floor completely replaced in the four months following. With the subfloor replaced everywhere but the kitchen-which needed replaced, but wasn’t in the dire-straits that the rest of the house was in. Tarps were thrown down to allow for easier navigation of the kids after the loose debris was vacuumed and was meant to be a very short day or two solution, but life marched on.
With kids living on top of the remodel with toys and everything, things began to run longer and longer. What had started as a day-in, day-out push to get everything done, became a weekend project, and then became an in-my-spare-time and convenience project. We bought a bunch of floating floor laminate with built-in underlayment from Costco-enough that it squat the back axle on the Suburban pretty bad. I focused most of my efforts on the girls’ bedroom and closet. Getting the drywall hung and mud and spackle was somewhat of a learning process. I had a screw gun and a lightweight impact driver, and had hung some drywall in my late teens so it wasn’t a huge learning curve, but there was definitely some learning and mistakes made along the way. Youtube has a ton of really good videos that address most types of house projects, construction projects, and remodeling projects. This is massively helpful, and shouldn’t be discounted, but still can’t compare to putting your hands on the project and learning in the process. Looking back it’s hard to remember any specific mistakes, but I cannot emphasize how important it is to measure twice and cut once, and check and double check the orientation of your cuts. A little drywall and a lot of flooring panels were wasted on the failure to orient properly.
Progress was very, very slow for quite some time. In late 2019 my mom and baby brother (who is almost a foot taller than me) came up from Matthews, NC to help with the kitchen floor while Angel and the kids were visiting her family in Kentucky. In the course of a day or two we got the last of the damaged flooring out (which was in overall okay quality, but we didn’t want to leave it.) And we got flooring and drywall installed in the pantry and the refrigerator nook. Up until this point the fridge had been living in the middle of our kitchen, but finally we were able to put it in it’s hole where it belongs.
Enter 2020. A disease which shall remain nameless brought society to a halt. With work no longer in the way I was able to focus and actually get the house cleaned up, keep the tarps out of the way, and organize everything to start finishing things. Angel’s parents volunteered to keep the kids for a few weeks and in that time we got all the mudding done and sanded, flooring down in the girl’s room, walls painted, and beds, dressers, and toys moved back into their room. The girls had been sleeping on a mattress on the floor of our bedroom this whole time, entirely too long for sure. Finally they would be in their own room again with their own space and their own beds, and we could have ours back.
That fall we took the children to see my in-laws again, and finished the flooring in the main part of the house. It was a collaborative effort between Angel, myself, my mom, and my brother Kevin. The process consisted of removing all of the undamaged floor that had not yet been removed, vacuuming as we went, and laying down the new floor. It was a hard push, but we got that done. Angel had chosen a new color of paint to paint the rest of the house- a “sigh” blue that gives the interior a coastal feel with the dark grey aged harbor wood look for the floor. The painting has gone in phases, but is, for all intents and purposes done. Already there are a couple spots that need to be retouched, and areas along the trim that need to be touched up with a fine point brush, but we’ll get there. The truth about home ownership is that the maintenance never stops, especially if you’re doing most or all of it yourself.
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