Remodeling

Our water heater shit itself sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning, relatively spectacularly (or in insurance-ese, we had a "catastrophic failure"). It looks like pressure was building up in the tank and started to force the lid off, the fittings on the top were leaking, and that's all she wrote. Our bedroom floor was soaked from the closet to about 3' all along the north wall, it was squishy under the flooring in the hallway, and the water heater closet had about 1" of standing water.

Of course, we didn't realize all this had happened until we woke up to feed the Taco on Sunday morning. At first, I thought "Great, the dog pissed on the floor again," but as the extent of the problem became obvious, we tracked it down to the water heater. ABJ called Pedro's plumber later that morning, who suggested that we contact our insurance company, that we may be able to claim the repairs. Indeed, that was the case, so Servpro came out that afternoon, and after about an hour of work, had torn out the carpet in our bedroom, the flooring in the hall, and had set up fans and dehumidifiers. Fortunately, they didn't find any damage or rot; though it appears the tank had been leaking awhile, there wasn't any mold.

So the upshot is we'll get new carpet, which we wanted to do anyway. We'll probably end up doing both bedrooms. We'll get new flooring, at least in the damaged area, possibly the living room too, if we can't find the material again. And, we'll get a new water heater. We're going to go tankless, while it's about 3x the cost of a tank, we'll get some much needed storage space and be more energy efficient. While it's not covered in the insurance claim, it's a good investment.

We've been talking about this episode as a good chance to clear out the house and start over, as far as interior design. So we may rent a storage space or POD and rethink how we're using the space. I think it'll be kinda fun, at least at first.