So last week, I tripped over a gigantic crack in my living room floor, and now we may just need to burn our house down and start all over.
...I exaggerate, of course, but what I am talking about here is one of those real life home improvement spiral-of-death-and-disaster type situations that we all find ourselves in from time to time. Of course, we were super thrilled that this one occurred when we are less than four months away from bringing a new baby home. Perfect timing. Really.
What really happened is this. We have hardwood floors throughout, which are antique and original to the house (with the exception of a few patched spots). They're lovely, but apparently they don't really care for us all that much. Several weeks ago, we noticed that the floors were sort of dipping and waving up slightly in a few spots all over the house. It was the kind of thing that you notice and say something to each other like - hey we should get someone to come look at that - and then you forget about it for another week.
Within a matter of days, the slight dip in my living room floor became a definite concave, and we starting calling contractors. Within a few days after that, before anyone could come and "look at it," the concave had become a puckered up rift the size of the New Madrid fault. Ok, not really, but it does run the length of half of my living room.
After gathering the opinions of a few flooring contractors that we know, the conclusion was that the hot water heater blowout we had last year had only been discovered after a period of time in which it sneakily leaked water into the sub-flooring of our house. The moisture apparently then spread throughout the house unseen, and spent the next year taking its sweet time making our floorboards expand until they started popping up all over the place.
We were told to contact our homeowner's insurance company, because they would obviously be the ones to help us out on something like this, right?
Wrong.
They very politely informed us that this was not their problem, since we didn't call them over to inspect the busted hot water heater a year ago, even though we had NO INTENTION of making a claim. So even though we've been paying them premiums for the past three years and have never used their services, they're not planning to help us out now because WHY WOULD THEY?
I just love insurance policies, don't you guys? Makes me feel the warm fuzzies all over. It's really my favorite thing to pay lots of money for a service that I'll never be able to redeem.
I realize that it's not even the fault of the particular adjustor or people who informed us of the company's policy, but come on guys...really?
Have you ever priced the replacement of hardwood floors over a whole house? You might as well just hand over your firstborn child, along with everything else you've ever owned in your life.
So we're currently working on several solutions - one of which being we are able to convince the insurance company to pay, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. The other involves a series of small patch jobs as we can afford them, and life will go on and the world will keep spinning and so forth.
So if anyone needs me over the next few weeks, I'll be sitting on my floor, stuffing money into the cracks and asking the boards why they have never loved me as much as I've loved them. Inanimate objects can be so selfish sometimes.
sharris@blythevillecourier.com