Rain, Rain Go Away!

Every December, we go out to a fancy dinner with our long time friends and then stay the night in a hotel.  We’ve been doing this for years as a Christmas gift to all of us.  It’s always great fun and it’s nice to have a night away.

This year (or I guess I should now say: last year) we had a lovely time and returned home the next day (Sunday) to this:

That’s paint!  Melting down the wall!

Turns out that the roof line just above there was not built up to standards and we’d had a bunch of rain the night before.  This had never caused a problem before, except that there was also a bunch of leaf debris in that spot which caused the water to pool…and then to find the path of least resistance: right down our wall!

We immediately got on the phone with our insurance company to start the claim process, then we contacted a water clean-up company to come out and help us get the thing dried out.  All day Sunday, I was trying to figure out how slice off the bubbling paint, so that I would have the least amount of repainting to do.

Imagine how I laughed at myself with the restoration people came the next day and proceeded to do this to my front entry:

Here I was worrying about having to repaint, completely ignoring the fact that the walls would need to come down in order to dry out what’s inside!  And this isn’t even my first flooding experience!

Not only did they cut off what you see here, but they cut off the other side of the arch and part of the ceiling  too!  They were definitely being thorough:

I was operating under the assumption that insurance would not be covering this, so we knew whatever they cut down was going to have to be replaced by us.  When I saw the arch get removed, my face had a sad.  :-(  I’ve hung, mudded, and taped drywall before, but never had I had to bend drywall and I’d never dealt with those blasted rounded corners before!

The restoration guys left about a million fans and dehumidifiers in my front room for three days.  The noise was maddening!  When they finally left, we were left with some gaping holes in our arch way and the knowledge of what we’d be doing for the next few weekends…