Most of you heard that the boys flooded our bathroom the other day when they were supposed to be napping. I took some pics of the incident just in case we needed some for any insurance purposes or Andy needed to show them to work since he left early to help me gain some sanity.
I never thought two toddlers could be so quiet while making such a HUGE mess. They stopped up Andy's sink and let the water continuously flow on full blast. I was trying to clean downstairs while I thought they were napping (Baby J was asleep when I left their bedroom and I left Baby D rubbing his eyes and I thought he was quickly on his way to napping...WRONG!). Anyway, after I cleaned the guest bathroom downstairs, the playroom, and went to unload the dishwasher I heard the footsteps and a giggle. I went upstairs to find my master bathroom door closed and them laughing. I opened up the door, saw the huge mess, and proceeded to slip and fall on my butt. What I didn't see at first was all the water ALL over the floor... I got the water turned off, the boys changed and put back to bed and went to put down all the towels that I could find. That wasn't nearly enough. I went and got all the blankets that I could find...that STILL wasn't enough. By that time, I called Andy in tears and he said he'd take lunch and come home to help me. Right after I talked to him, my Mom called. She was able to get me the number for some emergency people that deal with flooding (THANKS MOM!) and they came out right away. By that time, I had taken every bin of dirty clothes that we had and dumped them all over the bathroom floor to sop up the water and that helped get more up off the floor. I came downstairs to grab my mop and found that the water had started to pour through the laundry room vent over my head. I cleaned up the water downstairs that was on the floor and ran back upstairs to make sure that I got all the major water soaked up. I discovered that Andy's cabinet drawers were FULL of water...so I quickly dumped those out and got towels in them to dry them out. Unfortunately, they have some water damage...but it's only on the inside of the drawers so he's not too worried about it. By that point, Andy was home and the emergency people came shortly after. They probed our floors and walls and the downstairs ceiling and thankfully only a section of our drywall and baseboards and ceiling had anything to worry about. He recommended setting up 3 huge fans and a dehumidifer to those areas for 3 days to dry them out. They're coming out tomorrow to probe again to make sure it's all dried up. We did wind up with a small crack in the downstairs ceiling, but I guess it could have been a whole lot worse. We'll have to putty it and patch it up and repaint.
This is the only photo that you can honestly see that there's water on the floor (reflection of the window on the floor). But, they sure had a field day in there in the 15-20 minutes that I was THINKING they were sleeping. Now, they have a safety knob on their door so they can't get out and we're installing a door alarm as well so we know when they've opened the door for SURE.
Yeah, I think the cats will be glad to have the blowers and stuff gone too. They're so loud that they freak the cats out too....
We're constantly having to yell over them too and it would be nice to just be able to use normal voices to communicate with one another. UGH!
Yeah, they completely dumped out all the contents of my bathroom cabinet and scattered it all over the place. Then they dumped the cat litter all over, turned Andy's faucet on and plugged his sink and let the water flow out all over (did I mention that the water was also on full blast), dumped our hand towels in the cat's food and water dishes, they just had a grand old time and could not seem to understand why I was just not so amused when I found them having field day in all the water. There was not a dry spot on my bathroom floor at all! They also got into some ebay stuff that was in our bedroom and they tried to throw some stuff out of the window after they pushed the screen out. Little terrors! I did learn one thing though...I'm not opening up the upstairs windows anymore...I do not want them falling out!!
One thing that I am grateful for though is that it wasn't as expensive to clean up as we thought it was going to be...don't get me wrong it was still a pricey event to take care of, but we were more concerned that we thought we were going to have majoral structural damage when we saw that the water had made it through the ceiling and so forth. I'm just grateful that we had a real emergency fund built up and that it was only a small fortune to take care of it rather than the big one we thought it was going to be. Thank You, Dave Ramsey who we're taking our baby steps after!
