Our
personal water damage story
My wife Lynsey and I live in Sacramento and bought
our first home in 2003. One Friday morning Lynsey
left for work while I was washing down the front of
my car with a shammy leather cloth, realizing how
late it was I ran back through the garage and threw
the cloth into the laundry sink and turned on the
faucets to rinse out the soap. I hurried through to
the bedroom to pick up my gym bag and ran out the
front door completely forgetting about the water quickly
filling up the laundry sink.
When we returned around 10PM that evening after a
nice dinner out, we couldn't believe our eyes as we
opened the garage door and saw water pouring out form
the laundry room flooding the garage. The faucet had
been running since 8AM that morning and the entire
house from corner to corner was under 2 inches of
water. In a state of panic we turned off the faucet
and jumped on the phone to call our insurance company
who told us to look through the yellow pages for a
remediation company. We found several, called them
and only one picked up the phone. One guy (by himself)
came out pretty quickly and proceeded to rip off baseboards
(without scoring them with a blade) which tore the
paint on every wall. He then detached every carpet
from the tack strip and put a fan under each section
(called floating the carpet) and pretty much made
a big mess.
Looking back a few weeks later there were a few things
that disturbed me about our whole ordeal: