Water Heater in the Attic?

Back on the evening of November 5th, I had Zoe in my bath tub, I was in my shower (it's separate from the bath tub), and Mike was in the hall shower. We were rushing to get over to Jim and Rachel's house (Mike's brother) to meet their newest little bundle of joy, baby Caden. Mike had finished his shower and came into the bathroom to get dressed in the closet. Upon entering the closet, he heard a faint ringing coming from the attic (the entry to our attic is in our closet). "Huh?" he thought, "I wonder what that is? Wait!" He realized it was the water leak alarm that he had placed in our water heater bin. It was going off! That meant water was leaking!

Mike raced into the attic with a trash can and one of Zoe's bath buckets, tried turning off the water heater (that didn't do anything), and started desperately moving water from the bin and into the trash can. I, in the mean time, jumped out of the shower, threw on some clothes, then ran over to our next door neighbor's house with soaking wet hair. On the way out of the house I could hear water pouring through the walls. It sounded like somebody was just sitting in the attic dumping buckets of water through the pipes. I knocked on the door and exasperated, "Is Mr. Barton home?! I need help turning off the water to the house! Our water heater is leaking!". Luckily, he was home and ran over to our yard and turned the water off for us. Whew!

When I ran back up to our bedroom I noticed a huge puddle of water sitting on the floor in our bedroom, coming from the same wall that I heard the water pouring down. I then went up into the attic and found out from Mike that there had been water pouring out of the bottom of the water heater. It had busted. I ran back down the ladder, grabbed every towel we had and began to soak up the water.

Thank goodness we were home when it happened and were able to get the water to the house turned off!

Also, incase you were wondering. Zoe was playing in the bathtub this whole time without any interest or care in what was going on outside of her little area. :)

So, we called our home warranty (American Home Shield...we highly recommend them...they have been great so far) and told them what happened. Because this happened on Friday evening, they weren't able to get a plumber out until Saturday. No big deal. We saved the water in Zoe's bathtub and had plenty of water in our food storage.

The plumber came out the next day and confirmed that we needed a new water heater (duh) and had our home warranty order one. We didn't get a new water heater until the next Tuesday. No big deal, right? Well guess what? We couldn't turn the water to the house back on because when we did try it the water heater started spewing water again. Ho hum. Mike's dad lives nearby so we crashed at his house for a couple of nights. And for the rest of the time we just got really good at flushing toilets with buckets of water and used a lot of hand sanitizer. (It was a great trial run at testing our water supply storage! BTW, we highly recommend doing a test run of 48-72 hours, maybe over a long weekend, of using only water from food storage or your emergency supply. We found that we were underestimating our daily allowance need for water--unless we drastically changed our water usage habits. So we've increased how much we will store for emergencies per person per day.)

Anyways! We didn't really know what to do about the water damage and we didn't know how bad it might be. So we got the name and phone number, from the plumber, of a water restoration company and gave them a call. Dry Force is the name of the company. They have been GREAT so far. They came out the very day that I called them and did a water damage assessment. We still had a lot of water inside the walls and under the wood floor upstairs so they brought in huge, loud fans and de-humidifiers to dry the place out. And boy were they LOUD! It was like we had an airport runway upstairs. So for three days this is what our house was like:











































So, basically the large de-humidifiers pulled moisture from the air, walls, and floor and dispensed it via tubes down our bathroom sinks. This left the air extremely dry and hot. Our lips and skin got really dry! Mike already has an addiction to chapstick, and this nearly had him eating a steady diet of lip balm. There were also large floor fans used to help speed up the drying process. A technician would come by on a daily basis and use some cool tools to measure the moisture. For three full days, the machines dried out our house with deafening sound, but by the end our house was dry to the bone. While the house was drying out, we came to the conclusion that the damage was worse than we had originally thought and decided to go ahead and file an insurance claim. Our insurance company, Metlife, sent an adjuster out to see what the damage was. He was a super nice guy. We have been really lucky to work with great people so far. Anyways, he came to the house, checked it out, and sent a report back to Metlife.

We found out that they are going to, in short, replace the wood floors for us, paint our bedroom wall, fix the hole in our living room ceiling, and repaint our downstairs ceiling.

By the time we got our final report back from Metlife explaining what would be covered, it was after Thanksgiving and we asked our contractor if it would be okay to
wait until the holidays were over before starting all the work.

So, be on the look out for another update on this!