Sunday, March 18, 2012

When things went horribly wrong

Hello world! It was a fantastic weekend, till Sunday morning 5 AM. On Friday night, I spent time practicing a dance that I will be performing soon for a local event. Saturday morning, I spent cleaning house and talking to a dear friend. Afternoon, went out window shopping for furniture. Anu and family came over to my place in the evening. We had dinner together. Anu and her son stayed back. We talked like there was no tomorrow. At around 2:30 AM, we decided to wrap up and went to bed. We fell asleep, as soon as our head hit the pillow. Little did we know what was waiting for us.
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I am a very sensitive sleeper. At around 5 AM, when I turned over to change positions, I was awake for maybe 6 seconds. Enough to hear the sound of pouring rain. (at least that is what my brain registered at that point). Startled, I woke up and started running to look out of the window. It was not raining. So, then what was that noise? A little, frazzled, I decided to walk through the house. I first checked in the kids bedroom. All safe. Phew! that was a relief. Normally, I would have woken up my husband, but he was out of town. I checked the guest bathroom next. And what do I see? The toilet was overflowing, and the water was all over the bathroom and had come out int o the walkway, making the carpet all wet. The first thing, I did was, switch off the source of water to the toilet. Aah! I thought, everything was under control. But the sound of water that I could still hear, was louder than this over flowing toilet. That told me, that this was not all. There is something else, that was happening. With a sinking heart, I decided to go to the first level. An unpleasant situation welcomed me. There was a big hole in the ceiling of the formal living room, right under the leaking bathroom. See pic. below. I only have one side of the room. There were more patches, that I do not have the pics. for.
Water was gushing through the hole, with full force. The formal living room was completely soaked in water. It was a mess. I immediately ran upstairs and brought a bucket and placed it under the water fall. I placed dry bed sheets all over the floor, to soak the water out of the carpet. By this time Anu was wide awake and started helping me too. Together we used up at least 10 bed sheets (that's all I had). The water still kept dripping. I soon found out that the bucket had a hole, and my plan of collecting the water had failed. Luckily, Anu found another bucket.  I had a doubt that the water would have seeped into the basement too.  True to my guess, the water was dripping from the living room floor through the basement ceiling. We laid some towels there too. After around 2 hours of serious work, the water flow stopped. Phew! We were exhausted. The carpet and the rug were still wet as could be. We had reached a point, where there was nothing else we could do. I am still waiting for everything to dry. Now, there is a big gaping hole in the ceiling staring at me. Also, the water has flowed down walls. The paint of the walls are wet. A lot has to be fixed by contractors to get it back in shape. I plan to start looking for a contractor tomorrow. Till then no one uses the guest toilet. Since, we had guests, we had decided to use the guest toilet. The flush was not working properly. I was just looking at the positive side of this adventure. What if, I had not woken up at 5AM? I shudder to think. All things happen for a reason. Some unexpected losses are bound to happen in every one's life. Life has to go on. Like they say, what  doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. 

4 comments:

  1. what alovely ceiling Maya !

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    1. Lol Anon. It's still lovely. Waiting for the contractor to fix it on April 20th.!

      Maya

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  2. OMG...thats awful. divine intervention?:) Hope you find a contractor soon...Van

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    1. Yeah Van it must have been something like that. Glad it's all over. Waiting for the contractor to come and fix it on April 20th.

      Maya

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