Here You Have It....

Drum roll please….. Okay are you now ready for this? Our living room, dining room, and bedrooms are…. COMPLETE!!! Yes, you have read right. We now have painted walls, all floors in, and baseboards up! Our house looks great! I have to say, I really think this house flood was a blessing in disguise! The new flooring looks SO much better than carpet. It leaves the house with a more open, cleaner feeling. Not to mention it is more forgiving with the kids tracking dirt in or spilling something. I am just overly concerned about toys and furniture scratching it. Hopefully the felt tabs that we have placed under the furniture work as they are supposed to. I was so excited on Thursday evening to move the furniture back in the house, clean the garage, and CLEAN the house! Yes, you read right again. The OCD clean freak that I am found joy out of dusting, sweeping, and mopping!

 Pics of kids room soon!

Speaking of cleaning the garage… I can now park in it again! How cool is that? I know I am loving it and think it is just the grandest thing ever! Okay, so not ever, but it cuts pretty darn close to it! I know this sounds pretty insignificant think to most. However, to me, it’s a pretty meaningful thing. For almost two months our double car garage has had enough room for us to walk through. I do mean this as a literal thing. The path through the garage was tiny and pretty twisty. On Thursday when the house (all except the bathroom) was completed, Kevin and I moved all the furniture back in and managed to get it situated. On Friday I spent a considerable amount of time cleaning everything! Well, almost everything. I went through boxes and bags. I placed things in the house where they belonged, I threw things away, I put items in a “to be donated” pile. I CLEANED!!! 

The end result……:

Yes, Kev just shook his head at how the smallest of things put a smile on my face! Lol.

On Friday the guys showed up and removed the bathtub from the downstairs bathroom. When I write removed, I mean they straight ripped it out! Our bathroom looks incredibly bare now. As of now, Servpro is coming in on Monday to scrub the wood down and treat it to prevent mold forming at a later date. Once that is taken care of the contractors will come back in, replace the bathtub, tile the area surrounding the tub, replace insulation, walls, paint the bathroom and whatever else. Then our house should be just about completed. Well, except for the baseboards in minor repairs in the garage. We can't wait! We are just excited that after two months we will have some normalcy back in out lives.

A House of Water

This past week could definitely pass for one of the most chaotic and unexpected weeks we have had the “privilege” to experience. What a week! Last week El Paso was hit by a very unusual winter storm. With that being said, it only snowed a couple inches and the snow wasn’t even that big of an issue. It was the freezing, record breaking, temperatures that we experienced! We hit below zero degrees a few times, which left us feeling like it was -10 to -17 degrees outside when you factor in the wind chill. Past that, we did not see temperatures above 15 degrees for a few days, which of course, left us feeling it as below zero still! I know that to some of you this may not seem like a big deal at all. But, you have to remember we are in El Paso people! El Paso is not equipped to handle this type of weather. We are supposed to have mild winters and hot summers. Mild winters do not at all equal freezing temps! It got so bad that the electrical company was unable to keep up with the demand of what the consumers were trying to use. Needless to say, the houses out here are not built for that type of drastic change in the temperature either; leaving it very hard to keep the houses warm. The heaters all over town stayed on continuously; even they were kept at 65 on the thermostat. So, with the demand for electricity being used nonstop, we all had to endure Rolling Blackouts. The electric company had different areas on the grid taking turns through the blackout. It left us without electricity anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours. It was crazy! But, as I told Kevin, I would rather go that length of time without electricity over days without! Some areas of El Paso were out of Gas for a few days due to the demand of natural gas that was being used. All throughout El Paso, we thought that was the worst of it…. Of course that was said too soon! On Friday water lines started breaking in homes. Leaving a lot of people waking up to flooded houses. We left around lunch time that day to pick up groceries and whatever else we needed and come home to a few inches of water throughout the downstairs in our house. Yes, our water line in the backyard busted and our house had flooded. It made it up through about a quarter of our living room and out through the door and into our garage. In other words, the only safe area in our house was upstairs, the master bedroom and bathroom. The kids’ bedrooms, hallway, hall bathroom, kitchen and dining room were completely flooded. Of course Nic found excitement in his huge puddles of water that he splashed through. It is always great to hear his goofy laugh. We were without water for over 24 hours, which isn’t too bad compared to others. It was something we could work through. We managed to save all of our furniture and most everything else. Some books and small items like that were trashed. Breanna lost her phone charger from leaving it out on the floor. If that so far the worst of our personal damage, I will take it! As far as the house goes… we will know more next week on what is being done. The adjuster and General Contractor came out yesterday to access everything. Right now they are debating on ripping out the entire bathroom and how far up to go on the walls. Kevin and I did have to pull the carpet out of the house, which ended up being a good thing once we found puddles of water still under the mat. We vacuumed the carpet for hours nonstop and still could not get it all up. So, that too has to be replaced. We are hoping that the GC will have his guys out next week to start the repairs and what not.

Below you can get an idea of what we went through.... (Picture our house now a mess with no carpet... We are living on the concrete floor for the time. )

 This is where is all started...

 This is the area that water shot straight up a few feet and filled up the walls, leaving the house to be flooded when it seeped out everywhere.

 Now you see what popped and actually caused the flood.

 Living room view from Dining room

 Dining room walking into kitchen

 Just to show where the water was against the steps.

 Nic's room and the bathroom where hit the hardest.

 Nic's room

 Girls' room

 LR from DR

 Dining room

 Nic's room again

 Bathroom

 This is from the following morning... The carpet of course was no longer flooded, but the wood still soaked up way too much water within a few hours.

We Are Moving

The latest on our move....

Well, it turns out we will be about ten minutes from where we our currently living! Not too much of a change as we were hoping for! We found a house that we are very thrilled to be moving into the weekend of August 1. We completed our walk-thru yesterday, July 14. Everything went very smoothly, except I forgot the camera at home and had to take pictures from my cell phone. Seems to happen a lot lately! It will be great for all of us to get out of the apartment we are in now that we know we are staying at Fort Bliss a little longer.  Below are some pictures of the house we are moving into.

The outside... Though the grass is much greener now.

The backyard. (The grass in front is the same shade of green now)

Standing at the front door looking in. The living room, dining room, & some of the kitchen.

From the dining room wall. The rooms look a lot smaller than they actually are.

Kev in the kitchen. He wrote on the checklist since his writing is the smallest.

Kitchen again as well as some of the dining room. We are going to have to get bar stools!

Hall Bath

Stairs leading to Master

View from top of staircase at master bedroom

Master Bedroom, from entry

Our bathroom!

Our walk in closet. We also have a smaller one in the bedroom. This one is in the bathroom.

Toilet in it's own enclosed area.