Two years

Eddie in the crack house hotel
the night we flooded

Two years ago that 35-inch water main ruptured and our apartment flooded, along with about another 50 or so apartments. I wrote about it in 2009 and 2010 and I guess I’ll keep writing about it as long as it affects me the way that it does.

That was the start of a really long stretch of awfulness for us. We flooded on October 28 and had to find temporary quarters to live in. Then after returning from visiting our younger son and his family for Thanksgiving, Kent was told he would be getting laid off (I still didn’t have a job). Our trifecta of awfulness concluded a week later with us receiving notice of the condominium lawsuit that continues to prevent us from selling our place (no, the suit has nothing to do with the water stuff, and the reason we can’t sell is that banks won’t lend money for condos involved in lawsuits because of the potential liability).

Today, Kent has a job but I got laid off this summer. The lawsuit looks to be done but the arbitration that should conclude this whole nasty mess won’t even be scheduled until January or February. And I’m still jumpy when I hear unexpected water noises.

I think Wally was affected the most. He was never what you’d called a mellow cat even before the flood, and that day only made things worse. I wrote about how he ran into the rising waters to try to get to his safe spot and came tearing back into the bedroom absolutely terrified. Today he remains far more high strung than the other two cats. He’s really skittish and hides in inaccessible places when people come over.

As for me, I keep a charger near my phone which is near my handbag. My passport is easily accessibly (and well above a potential water line). The cat carriers are not stored under anything, they are very easy to get to in a closet that doesn’t have a door. If there were a next time, I wouldn’t waste a moment throwing towels at the back door as I did two years ago, and I wouldn’t call 911 until after I got the cats in their carriers and out the door. But I would still remember to get the Scotch.

Poor rug

We got this area rug almost eight years ago, right after we got married. Kent had talked me into creating a wedding registry, which I thought was both silly and inappropriate. After all, both of us had been married before and really who would buy us gifts? I reluctantly agreed with the caveat that we'd register only for small things and only at two places; we chose Williams-Sonoma and Pier 1.

As part of the wedding registry scheme, stores generally give you discount coupons when you register. We used the one from Pier 1 to buy a 5x9 wool area rug made up of color blocks. They don't make the rug any more alas, but it sort of looks like this, only the colors were more muted.

Even though it was 100% wool, that rug wasn't the highest quality rug ever made. I wasn't surprised that when we flooded in 2009, it didn't come back in great shape. It was still usable but the binding along one edge had come undone which made vacuuming quite challenging.

The second water incident earlier this year has ended that rug's life. We managed to get it folded up and outside after the frozen pipe burst, but it was soaking wet and of course it froze solid once we got it out there. It's still out there, six weeks later, folded and frozen and waiting for a thaw so we can get it out to the trash.

I think the rug helped us avoid more damage this time, though. I think it acted like a giant sponge and soaked up water that might otherwise have shorted out all our kitchen appliances again.

Sadness

Remember the neighbor's pipe that froze in our ceiling, ruptured and then dumped water all over our floors? I just now took this picture in the living room (rupture was in our bedroom ceiling) and you can see what's happening to the wood floors throughout the entire apartment.

The camera is crooked because the floor is that warped, and yes, you do see a board that's popped completely out.

Wally just had to be in the picture.

An update and why we can’t sell

The update:

The burst pipe is in our ceiling/neighbor’s floor over our walk-in closet at the back of the apartment in our bedroom. The water came in through the walls and ceiling and reached the living room. We currently have some holes in our ceiling and will need that to be replaced along with portions of the walls.

Our wood floors are the hardest hit and are already bowed and buckling. Since we live in a sub-grade space, the floors are wood over engineered wood and they float (can't really put normal wood floors on top of concrete). Since they float, there are ready-made channels for water to flow and that's exactly what it did. When we step on boards in the living room, for example, we see water seeping up. It should dry out quickly—this is winter after all, and the driest time for Boston. But the floors are ruined.

Next steps involve figuring out if the condo association makes an insurance claim or goes with a special assessment. The risk in another claim is that we had a huge claim from 2009 and apparently there was another water situation in 2004 (don’t know any details about that). The condo association runs the risk of not being renewed next year if we file yet another claim around water. But a special assessment won't go over well with the owners either. Now I'm really glad I won't be at the condo association meeting. I would have a hard time biting my tongue.

Once the financials are settled, then the painful reconstruction starts. With three cats in the house, it's a chore to make sure contractors shut the door so they don't get out. And all the commotion freaks them out anyway. Add in my travel schedule and Kent's travel schedule and well, I get overwhelmed just thinking about managing this mess.

Why we can’t sell:

The very technical picture (fear my mad PowerPoint skills) shows how the seven apartments make up the condominium association. Originally, 1 and 3 Claremont Park were two separate brownstones, but the lady who owned both buildings ended up making a one floor apartment that spanned both buildings.

So we have two buildings joined by one apartment which means we have one condo association. The blue units are the garden units and both flooded last year (we live in number 7). The Ferals live in apartment 2 and they are the ones who had the frozen pipe for three days and refused to let the plumber open any walls to find the leak. In fact Mr. Feral spent an hour yesterday morning lecturing the master plumber on how to do his job. As you might imagine, that didn’t go over well.

The Hatefuls live in apartment 4; they are the ones who are suing the condo association and the people in apartment 5 (for proper serial construction, we'll call them the SuperNice).

Until the lawsuit is settled (and it has nothing to do with our 2009 flood and everything to do with their sense of entitlement about other issues), no bank will underwrite loans for apartments in our building. The potential risk of a huge special assessment is just not one any bank will take. So we are stuck.

Once we can sell, believe me we will. And we are seriously considering renting. Given how we haven't yet landed someplace we believe will be our home for decades, and how volatile the job market is, we think we need to stay flexible with housing.

I was going to rant about the Ferals

That's what I call our upstairs neighbors. But instead I'm going to rant about whatever huge pipe that's burst and has flooded us again. Water is coming in from the back walk in closet and has reached the living room.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

An anniversary

I am the family historian; significant dates in the family tend to mean a lot to me and I remember those events each year. So it's not surprising that I'm marking this anniversary too. One year ago today, I took this picture after I'd wrangled cats into their carriers and hauled them up the front stairs to the foyer.



My mom has asked me how I thought to take that picture (which I took from the bottom step because as you can see, the apartment was already pretty flooded). I took it because somewhere in my chaotic thoughts, I feared that the insurance company might not believe we had gotten flooded. I know that sounds silly now but that's why I took it--to prove we'd sustained water damage.

I wrote a lot about the flood over the course of reconstruction; if you search on the word flood, you'll find those posts.

What happened on October 28, 2009 sure opened my eyes to how devastating water damage can be, and how pervasive it is. Today I find myself identifying with people whose homes get flooded in a way I never did before.

I'd love to say this whole thing is behind us, but it's not. I am still jumpy when I hear unexpected water sounds. and Wally is far more skittish than he was prior to the flood.

I think I wrote about what he did that day. I was in the bedroom trying desperately to stuff unwilling cats into their carriers. He got free of his and ran out to the office area which is right by the back door. I know he wanted to get to his safe spot, our cat perch. But it was out in the deepest parts of the water near the door, which meant he ran ran through the rising water. (Quick aside, yeah that sounds like a cliche but honestly our house was filling like a bathtub.) He came tearing back into the bedroom with wet legs and tummy, all wide eyed and freaked out. I have never seen a more terrified animal than Wally was that minute.

So the event is over but the effects linger on. It's that way with any significant event, I guess; over time the immediate intensity of emotion fades but it probably never goes away entirely.

That's life

I’ll confess I was feeling a bit complacent this week. Kent busted his butt and got all our budget stuff loaded into Microsoft Money Plus (it’s free, find details here from one of my favorite personal finance blogs) which is letting us track our budget pretty much in real time, we've tweaked and adjusted that budget so now it's really working for us, and we aren’t touching our savings (although they aren’t growing either alas).

You may recall we have an unfinished repair to flood damage in the foundation on the patio side of our apartment. We'd been calling around to various masons since April, but no one would return our calls, let alone come out and give us an estimate. We know it’s because our job is small potatoes to them; most of them have a lot of work right now from the damage all the brownstones across Boston sustained last March. So we asked our realtor for a recommendation, which he provided and he suggested mentioning his name. Wow did that ever work! We called Friday, the mason came out Tuesday and gave us the estimate yesterday—$3300. Gulp—we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

We do have the money, but replacing it will hurt. This is the nitty gritty party of budgeting, not the fun stuff. I’d much rather be considering spending that kind of cash on a super cool trip rather than on a house I dislike and can’t wait to sell.

Wavy floors

I mentioned we got more water damage a couple of weeks ago. This video lets you see a bit of the waviness of our floors. I should get a video of Kent stepping on one of the big buckles because in addition to seeing practically the entire floor move, you can hear the air whistle out from underneath when he squishes it.

Lessons learned

First, it turns out Boston got between two to four inches of rain in that 30 minute monsoon. You can see pictures of water elsewhere in the city here. I don’t know that we got four inches but I’d bet it was more than two just based on how fast the lower level of the patio filled up. I didn’t take a picture of it (I was a little busy), but the gnome we use to keep the gate open was almost entirely covered.

After we flooded last October, I’d told Kent that the pet carriers had to be stored in a specific spot in the closet under the front sidewalk. That closet doesn’t have a door and the spot I wanted to put the carriers is easy to access even if it’s dark and things are crazy/confused. So Saturday it was very easy to get the carriers out, grab the cats (who were already huddled in our bedroom—they know the drill) and shove them in.

I also didn’t waste any time speculating that we wouldn’t take on water. We were both still in slippers and I told Kent he better get some shoes on ASAP. And as I ran around getting cats where they belonged, I also picked up laptop bags and moved them to higher ground. I knew right where my passport was, plus my check book and immediately put those sorts of things in my bag.

I did cry a bit while I was moving things and shoving furniture further away from the water, but I didn’t freak out at all and I kept working.

Now we need to solve the problem. As part of that, Kent’s looking at ways we can re-grade the parking lot behind us. While we don’t own a spot there, others in our building do and right now it’s graded to slope down toward us. Obviously that just creates more run off which is why we ended up with water on Saturday. The drain by our back door does work but we’d have needed about five of those to handle that much rain. Unfortunately we may need to pay for this since (a) our condo association already needs to pay to have the building tuck-pointed as a result of the nor’easter we had in March and (b) there’s not enough money to pay for that. I’m not thrilled about shelling out OUR money for condo repairs but I sure as hell do not want any more water in our apartment.

Close call

Boston (and Portsmouth, NH) got some heavy, heavy rain today. I got home and couldn't open the gate into the patio because so much gravel had been swept inside the patio. Kent had to come out and move gravel just so I could get in.

He said it was his turn today to see the lower level of the patio start to fill up and then yell "No, no!" at the water. The drain (which is by our door) had clogged with leaves and seeds and stuff so he had to clear it out three or four times so the water wouldn't back up over our door thresh hold.

I asked him if he really did yell no and he admitted he did.

If we flood again, I swear I'm just packing up the car and we are moving to NH.

Remnants

So the apartment still isn’t what I’d call done. Oh the major stuff is—we have walls, appliances, heck we even have beautiful floors. We also have a punch list that’s two pages long. Not a single room is actually finished.

We spent some time yesterday knocking off some of those items and have more to do today. Kent worked repairing our living room windows (which were damaged by the nor’easter we had in March) while I tackled the patio. Since Kent is a redhead and might spontaneously combust in the sunshine, it seemed to be a good distribution of labor.

It’s been easy to overlook how damaged the patio was by all that water because it didn’t affect our living space, and I mostly just see it as I come and go to work. The patio is one of the major reasons we bought this apartment—we really wanted some outdoor space and that’s very hard to come by in Boston.

Our patio is mostly brick with a band of growing space along three of the four sides, and it’s also two levels. The upper level is closest to the alley, and the lower level is partially under the balcony of the apartment upstairs. We’d put in a lot of shade-loving ground cover and I must say the ivy appears to have loved being nearly drowned because it’s growing like crazy.

We’d also planted herbs and flowers in colorful pots that we could move to chase the sun around the patio. Some of the pots had broken or were so damaged I had to toss them and in all cases the soil in them ended up being packed in there like cement. So I had to use a trowel to break up the soil. We’ve got a storage chest we store those kinds of tools in—it’s about five feet long, stands not quite three feet high and is probably a couple of feet deep. When I opened the lid, I realized that it still had water in it from the flood. Everything in there was covered with silt and grime and the water line was obvious both on that and also on our grill (which we still need to check to see if it works).

I swept up a lot of sand from the lower level, so at some point we’ll need to redo those bricks. I look forward to the day when I don’t see any reminders of that stupid flood.

With a vengeance

I’m pretty good at paring my things down; I’ve never been much of a pack rat (although I was married to one in my first marriage). I’ve talked before about how many times I’ve moved over my life and I do think Kent is right—I constantly prune my belongings in anticipation of the next move.

But when Sal’s delivered our salvaged clothing and household items, Kent and I both knew it was time to be utterly ruthless. (Kent used to be a pretty good pack rat himself and decided seven moves ago he was done with that, so now he purges with the best of them.)

Before we could do the sorting and tossing, though, Kent had to make things safe for our cats—especially Wally. Sal’s delivered almost everything on hangers and covered with plastic bags like you’d see at the dry cleaners. Then the hangers had been rubber-banded together. Well Wally likes nothing better than to eat plastic bags and rubber bands, so Kent spent about 90 minutes just taking off the bags and the bands.

We spent yesterday going through over 20 linear feet of hanging belongings. We needed to determine which items just hadn’t been saved (most actually had) and after that the purging began in earnest. You can get a glimpse of the stuff we went through in the slideshow to the left. At one point our queen size bed was entirely covered to a depth of about 18 inches with items we were donating to Goodwill.

We also had to sort through our shoes. While we’d done a rough cut last fall, we needed to finish that chore up and it was not a lot of fun because at this point we had mostly ruined shoes left—and when I say ruined, I mean shoes with mold growing on them and stinking of mildew.

We did get one very nice surprise. We’d both written off our down booties as ruined just because they’re down-filled and we knew they’d been below the water line. I sure didn’t think they would have been salvageable. I opened up one of two boxes from Sal’s and there they were, all pristine and just waiting for us.

We filled the back seat and cargo area of my CR-V with items to donate to Goodwill. I'll probably find more things to donate but we made a lot of progress yesterday.

Edited to add that the quilts my mother made me look to be fine. So that's more great news. And also here's a picture of the cats after Kent did the plastic/rubber band removing exercise. Clearly they were worn out.

Counters

So it's been two steps forward, and sometimes two steps back. For example, I mentioned the water damage we got last weekend during our nor'easter when we received 9 to 10 inches of rain mostly blown horizontally for about 36 hours. What I didn't say (because I didn't know) was that the dry wall above the windows was pretty severely damaged and repairing them isn't going to be a matter of a little spackle and paint. But as Kent pointed out, we no longer flinch when holes are cut in our dry wall.

Then we had another issue that came to a head today. Our new fridge is a french door fridge and the cabinets needed to be moved about an inch to the left, otherwise we couldn't open the right door. Kent said the contractors were not at all happy about that, and neither were the granite installers since they had to stand around and wait while the contractors moved the cabinets and re-leveled the dishwasher. But the kitchen looks fantastic now, don't you think?

We also had granite put on top of our new cabinet in the bathroom and here's what that looks like:







The plumber had to reschedule (no bathroom sink yet, also the dishwasher and kitchen sink need to be hooked up along with the ice maker in the fridge), and the electrical inspector somehow went to the wrong place and your guess is as good as ours as to when he will return.

The countdown continues. We have to be completely out of here by Thursday, March 31 which means in practical terms we clear out of here next weekend.

Look, look!

We did get water coming in through the drywall at the tops of our living room windows this weekend *shakes fist at the nor'easter* but just look at the progress Kent is making with the painting. I want to echo Pinocchio and say we are almost at the real apartment stage!

Flood update

If you’d told me on October 28 that we would still be living in temporary quarters on January 6—10 weeks later!—and that reconstruction still would not have started, I wouldn’t have believed you.

And yet that’s where we are. Our apartment is still the same ruined mess and we are still living on the eighth floor on Mass Ave.

I do have some progress to report, though. Right before New Year’s Day, we received notification that the condominium association’s insurance company had agreed on a figure for the reconstruction cost. We don’t actually have a check just yet, that won’t get here until the end of January.

As a quick aside, reconstruction is more complicated here because we have the condominium association’s insurance, which covers the walls, the floors, the kitchen cabinets and some major appliances, and we have our personal property insurance which will cover those appliances not covered by the condominium association’s insurance. Since the condo association’s insurance company had their own adjuster plus a public adjuster, the whole negotiation process took a long time.

Anyway, we have requested estimates from two general contractors and have begun the tedious process of finding replacements for our stove, dishwasher, refrigerator and so on. Honestly it’s overwhelming. The general contractor we are almost certainly going to use says it will take four to six weeks to rebuild once he starts if we have all the necessary permits (which is a huge pain in the rear in Boston) and the appliances and cabinets. We’re thinking it will be more like eight weeks. So even if he starts on Monday, which he won’t, we are in this apartment for the rest of the winter. Bleh.

Update and snow

I tried to post this yesterday but blogger's video upload feature kept getting hung up.

It's not a big update, because nothing's changed. The insurance company hasn't yet approved the construction plan so our housing situation remains as it was six weeks ago. If I don't learn patience now, I don't think I ever will.

We woke up this morning to snow, great big huge flakes getting blown by the wind. I'd thought the kitties would really love our wall to wall windows, but I think we are too far up for them to really see people or animals, so they don't get engaged with what they see. Well this morning Wally did. I took this video as the snow turned to rain, and consequently Wally was losing interest. Eddie wasn't interested anyway.

Things that say love

The tin I kept my bobbins in was below the water mark. I pulled it out anyway, and hoped that perhaps I'd gotten them out in time to be saved. I knew the thread would need to be discarded but the bobbins aren't cheap and I had enough that replacing them wouldn't be easy. Well as you can see, they were ruined. In the top right of the picture, the red stuff in the plastic bag is rust, and you can see rust on a couple of the bobbins, too.




I'd already asked my mother to track down an invisible zipper foot for my Bernina, since the Bernina stores near me had all gone out of business (which is why I thought replacing the bobbins would be a hassle). She found one, and very kindly picked up a sleeve of the Bernina bobbins too.





Today Kent and I were in Target. You already heard me complain about not being able to decorate this year, and Jeanne had the great suggestion of making a paper tree to tape on the wall. We were prepared to do just that when we found this tree. I didn't want to spend the $20 to get it, but Kent asked me if it would help our place feel more like home and more like Christmas. Well he made me cry in Target, and now we have a little bit of Christmas decoration here. The tree is supposed to be shatterproof; I'm sure the kitties will put that to the test.

The effect of stress on cats

I’m not one to humanize animals, but Wally is one stressed kitty. He wanders around down here in the basement, crying and crying. When I go upstairs even for a moment, he cries at the top of the stairs. He roams all night long crying and getting into things, and he’s inconsolable.

I’m not surprised, he’s always been more sensitive to change than the other two cats. And he’s the one who ran into the rising water—I’m pretty sure he was trying to get to his safe spot, the top of our cat perch. I’ve never seen such a terrified cat when he came scrambling back into the bedroom, and getting him into his carrier was really tough.

We have a soft carrier that’s pretty much worthless, it’s too small for any of the cats and it’s difficult to close and to carry. But Wally has used it before as a safe hidey hole so I am hoping he will do so again. I sprinkled some cat nip in the carrier and put in one of his favorite toys. Then I just sat by the carrier for a bit.

Temporary housing

Yesterday Kent filled out the necessary paperwork to get us moved into temporary housing. While we have been very thankful to be here in Providence, the additional commute time plus our total isolation has just made the last couple of weeks pretty tough. Winter is coming and even though Kent takes the train, I still have to get him there and Providence is pretty hilly. And at some point construction will start on our apartment, and we'll need to be closer to hand as questions come up.

We'll be living at 221 Mass Ave which is in Back Bay and less than half a mile to our apartment. Use the minus sign (-) to get both places in view if they don't show already.


View Larger Map

Here's the distance from our apartment to the house in Providence:


View Larger Map

I don't look forward to getting moved but I do look forward to actually being there and getting settled.

Videos!

I posted a couple of these on Facebook but I'm still going to post them here. I took three videos so they wouldn't be too large to upload. The noise you hear are the huge fans and dehumidifiers going non-stop.





You'll hear me laugh in this one because I tripped over a trash can. I thought maybe I'd stumbled onto a Three Stooges movie.