Hour 25, The Flood

Our first 24 hours in the new house were exciting and uneventful. We all just walked around looking out all the windows saying things like I can't believe this is really ours, Is this for real, Did we just buy a house?

We moved in some more furniture, put a few things away, and then....

Hour 25 hit.

It all started when we were rearranging the small kitchen to be more functional. Which meant moving the refrigerator over next to the range for the time being. We have future plans that don't include this set up, but for now the fridge and range needed to be best buddies. Everything fit... Almost. The range stuck out less than a quarter of an inch too far and we couldn't open up some drawers. We looked at each other. Then looked at the wall. And at the same time we both say something to the extent of, "you know babe, that old 80's paneling is probably about a 1/4 of an inch thick.... if we just take that off..."

So we started taking off a little piece to see what was behind.

 

And then some more. And pretty soon we found something that we were pretty sure was inside the walls of the original house. LOGS!

We were very excited! We started in on full on demo mode to remove the layers that were over the logs. It was not a pretty job. We had many layers and tons of mouse dropping.

At some point Timothy said that we will need to replace a fitting on the hot water tank (which is also in the kitchen, for now) because it had a small drip. We put that on our list and he continued to tear down while I take loads outside.

While I was outside I heard a weird noise and turn around as Timothy runs past me and yells over his shoulder, " The water shutoff is in the pump house, right?". I run into the house to see the hose from the hot water heater spraying gallons of water out all over our kitchen, wall debris and mouse dropping on the floor. We had officially flooded our brand new house that we had been living in for 25 hours.

Thankfully, my husband and I do not fight in stressful situations, we are those weird people who can laugh in the midst of chaos. 

We got a hose hooked up the the tank so we could drain it into the yard and not our kitchen. Did I mention this all happened on a Friday night at about 6:30? And that we live in a small town that closes down at 6? We decided just to turn the water off. And keep taking off the layers of wall. Rational? We thought so. What we got was beautiful... you know after we sucked up all the water in a wet/dry shop vac. And took out many loads to our ever growing dump pile. And after we weren't able to take a shower after all that nasty demo, because we wouldn't turn the water on for fear that another flood would happen. I would say that it was definitely worth it. Plus, we have a one of a kind story. 

Here is the exposed wall of the little cabin built in 1910 that we now call home. What do you think of them? 

Oh and buy the way it took from Friday night to Monday night, calls to 3 plumbers, 2 burnt out heating elements and finally 1 new hot water tank that the hubby had installed in less than 45 minutes before we had hot water again. 

Oh well.... Now we know.