Basement Remodel After Flooding

The day we arrived home from our trip to Egypt at the end of October, we woke up very early to find that a pipe had broken and our basement was flooding. Kent turned off the water, but not before about 90% of the floor had been covered with water. We called our insurance company at 5am and at noon we had workers come out to soak up the water and rip out the wet carpet. They set up three de-humidifiers in the basement to absorb the water out of the air and walls.

Below are some pictures of the basement with the carpet pulled up.

The leak came from the pipe in the opening in the wall, so this was the area that got the most wet.

The workers went through the basement and cut off all the drywall that had absorbed water.

Next this storage unit was delivered into our driveway, and the workers

proceeded to pack up the contents of the basement and load it into the storage container.

Considering the items were just being moved to our driveway, the packers did a very thorough job of wrapping the furniture and boxing everything up.

The only thing they left was my piano. Since this is where I teach, I needed to have access to the piano. I taught for a couple of weeks at the church, but had to make lots of changes to my schedule to fit everyone in before 7pm.

The workers refinished the walls and repainted the entire basement, but when it came to doing the floors, Kent couldn't find a company who was available to put them in immediately. By now it had been a month and we were ready to be done with the project!

                                                                 Kent worked it out with the insurance company that he would do the work putting in the floors himself. He hired a young adult man from church to help him.

He decided on using a vinyl flooring that looks like wood and is installed in planks.

It went in very well and was easy to work with. Part of the flooring was already tiled, but the rest of the basement had been covered in wall to wall carpeting. Now the entire basement is covered in the vinyl flooring.

It looks very nice and should survive getting wet in case the basement ever floods again.

Kent finished installing the flooring the first week of December, and the movers came and brought the boxes back into the house. I was happy to see my belongings again after six weeks, but I didn't think about the fact that now things I was looking for were packed away in boxes and would have to be unpacked! And it was Christmas season, the busiest time of the year!!

I didn't get most of the boxes totally unpacked until the middle of January. We bought an area rung to cover the center of the room, and the remodel job looks very good.

I bought new curtains for the room since I was tired of the old window treatments I'd put up in 2008.

Now that all the work and hassles are behind us, we're glad to have a basement makeover!