As of this year, our house is 9 years old. And it's showing it. I can't believe how many things we've had to replace in the 5 years we've lived here, most of which have actually been within the past year. Last year alone, we replaced our fridge, water softener, and dishwasher. Good times! And as of this year, we have completely repainted, re-done all our plants and flowers in the front yard, and re-carpeted. Although I will say, the recarpeting was NOT planned. It all started last November...
Our piece of junk dishwasher started to have issues for the umpteenth time, and we were tired of repairing it. So we opted for a new one, which I let my handy-dandy husband install. After a couple trips to Lowe's having difficulty finding the exact right plumbing parts for the installation, he thought he'd found one that was going to work and got it installed with no hang-ups.
Fast foward a few months... We had my family up for dinner one evening and stuffed the dishwasher pretty darn full. I started the dishwasher about 10 that night and went to bed. Ella was fussing in the middle of the night so I got up to give her her binky, and thought that something felt weird in the house. Almost a humid feeling. But I was too tired to care so I gave Ella her binky, and went back to bed. 6:30 rolls around and again I wake up, noticing the same humid feeling, but just like before, I'm too tired to care, especially because the kids were off school that day. I wanted to sleep in! Finally, 8:00 rolls around and Ella is awake and hungry. So I drag myself out of bed to go make her a bottle and as I am going downstairs, I notice a weird sound, like water is running. I also see all of our windows are dripping with humidity. I discovered the sound was coming from the kitchen, where our floor was covered in about 2 inches of water and water was rapidly flowing out from under our dishwasher! I yelled at Greg to come downstairs and bring towels, LOTS OF TOWELS! He rushed down and slipped on all the water, giving me towels that literally did not even make a dent in the water. I thought that maybe we had stuffed the dishwasher too full and it had started leaking out the front. But by the time Greg finally got the water turned off and the dishwasher pulled out, he found that the hot water line from the back had come disconnected at one point and that was the source of the problem - and as some of you may know, the line into the dishwasher does not have low pressure, trust me! It was spraying everywhere! As the day progressed and we got the kitchen as dry as we could, we found that the water had spread to other places we didn't even realize - our living room, our storage room beneath the kitchen, and our toy room beneath the living room. It was an extremely overwhelming day, to say the least.
As the week went on and we kept finding more and more water, we decided it was time to call our homeowner's insurance and get some help! They sent out a flood company to help dry things out. Even a week later, our sheetrock in our kitchen was 80% water! It was nuts! Luckily, they got things dried out very quickly with no mold issues, so we didn't have to replace any of that. But as we got into the carpet area, we noticed that the backing to the carpeting was pealing apart from the fibers, which means it cannot be stretched again. Some people may find this exciting, but I was worried out of my mind because we hadn't budgeted for new carpet, and I figured the insurance company would only pay for the rooms that got wet - about 20% of the carpet in our house. Fortunately, we got an awesome insurance adjustor who decided to give us money for any room you could see from the rooms that got wet. For those of you who have been in our house, you know it is extremely open. So in the end, the insurance gave us money for every single room in our house, except our bedrooms (living room, family room, stairs, hallways, and our toy room). In the end, we spent $550 out of pocket for our whole house to be re-carpeted! It was awesome! :) And we love the new carpet - it is so soft and thick!
So here's the BEFORE (I just had to find a random picture that showed our old carpet, so you get to see a cute pic of Ella at the same time!):
And AFTER:
Sorry if it's kind of hard to see, but you can tell it is darker and A LOT thicker than what we had before!
I also wanted to quickly post some pictures of Ella's nursery. After a year, it is FINALLY completely done! :) Well, it was done when Ella was born - I just wanted some cute curtains too. So my mom was so sweet and made some for me! And I LOVE them! When we switch Ella's room to a big girl room in a few years, I am basing everything around her curtains so I can keep them because they are so adorable! So here are some before pics when Ty was in there:
And here it is AFTER (sorry that the first couple of pictures are a bit dark):
Aww, doing a girl's room is SO much more fun than a boy's! :)
Well, that's all for now. :) -Ash
