Happy New Year?

Not so much, in our case.

Went out on December 31st to do some shopping at the nearby Arundel Mills shopping center. Spent about 4 hours shopping there and returned home around 4 pm - came home to find the doorsill was wet. Uh oh. Not a good sign.

I opened the door and found about an inch to an inch and a half of water in the "foyer" (it's really just a 4'x4' stone thing, not sure what they call them) and saw that the kitchen was full as well. Ran into the kitchen while yelling to Heather that we had a problem. Something under the sink was just gushing water at a fierce rate. We couldn't immediately see a valve, so we turned the water flow to the house off.

After a few moments of discussion, I went to my Bed Bath & Beyond to borrow a Wet Vac and Heather called the insurance company and found a water extraction service online. By the time I'd returned, though, most of the standing water (from the kitchen and our "foyer") had been absorbed by the carpet.

The water guys said they'd be on their way, but they had another job in front of us. Meanwhile, could we do what we could to get everything off the affected floor? We live in a two-level townhouse, and the lower level was flooded. So we had to move most of the contents of the first floor into the second floor, a process that took hours and that was still ongoing when the water guys arrived at quarter to midnight. Yup, fifteen minutes before the ball dropped. We couldn't fit some things upstairs, like the dining room table that came from Heather's grandmother's house (and that might be an antique).

The water guys set to work ripping up carpeting to get at the padding underneath, which was a total loss. They "floated" the carpet, a process which involves a number of industrial strength fans blowing underneath it to dry it out. We also have a dehumidifier and the biggest HEPA filter I've ever seen, to deal with allergies (I had an attack around 1:30 am due to all of the stuff in the air). The fans and such have to stay in the house for 3-5 days while they attempt to salvage the carpet. The floor of our bathroom and kitchen is a total loss and will have to be replaced.

The water guys ended up leaving around 2 am, and Heather and I settled in to bed around 3. Our upstairs is packed full of everything we could fit - meaning the guest room is packed full and our bedroom, the birds' room, the hallway and steps are stuffed to the point of making it difficult to walk. and the downstairs is essentially uninhabitable. Every surface in the kitchen has boxes or books or something on it, and we can't use the oven. The microwave and refrigerator are accessible, at least.

Savannah was actually downstairs when I first saw her, sitting on the floor in one of the few dry areas, looking at the encroaching waters with what can only be described as disgust on her face. She walked through it at times, shaking her paws after every step, but she later decided that it would be better to be up high and started using furniture. Still later she decided that even the furniture wasn't high enough and climbed up on Heather and I for a brief while, before we exiled her to the upstairs. She's going stir crazy (along with the rest of us) because we won't let her out of the master bedroom.

We're waiting to hear from our insurance company now (they weren't open on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day to process our claim), but we're really hoping they'll cover this. We didn't lose anything irreplacable, and in fact, didn't lose much at all. Most of the furniture seemed okay, and there wasn't much on the floor that wasn't proected by boxes or something else. It's mostly just the floor itself - carpeting, tiles, etc. - that suffered.