When it rains, it pours.

The rain got us into this mess, and now the idiom is proving to be true.

So I posted about the Great Flood of 2010, and how that led to us needing to replace the back french doors and a couple of planks of hardwood flooring.  That lead to getting an estimate and bid on some kitchen work.  That lead to purchasing new granite countertops for the kitchen.  That to a need for a new cooktop.  That lead to the "well, might as well do this once" mentality, which lead to new ovens and a new microwave.  And the "might as well do this once" mentality also led us to re-do the 1/2 bathroom downstairs.  Typical home remodel story.

So the appliances are on the truck, the granite is being fabricated for the kitchen and 1/2 bath, and I have paint waiting for pick up at Sherwin Williams.  We start ripping everything out bright and early tomorrow morning.

But as fate would have it, it's not enough to just make our 32-year-old house pretty on the surface. 

Sunday before Rob got home I took a shower and noticed it was a little cold, but chalked it up to the fact the bathroom doors were open, the fan in the bedroom was still on, and the AC was still set to"subartic" (Thanks, pregnancy hormones).  But Sunday night I went to take another shower and realized it just wasn't warm.  At all.  We tried every sink in the house- no hot water.

Apparently, our hot water heater went out.  Luckily it didn't go out by busting a hole and spilling 50 gallons of water into my garage, but it still meant an ice cold shower this morning.  And probably tomorrow.

If you are counting, that means, since May, we have purchased a new AC system, double ovens, microwave, cooktop and now water heater.

One more good rainstorm and we might just put the house on the market.

The Great Flood of 2010

When Rita came through Houston in 2005, I "fled" to Austin.  By "fled" I meant I took a long weekend to go see my fiance since I had a great excuse to do it.  If you think people in Houston are bad about hurricanes, people in the hill country are even worse.  When I got to Austin the talking weather heads were starting to forecast lots and lots of rain up here, and there wasn't a can of Spaghetti-Os or a case of bottled water to be found at H-E-B.  Everyone was preparing to live in utter chaos for several days.  Not to miss out on the fun of purchasing emergency supplies, I bought 2 large bottles of lemon flavored Perrier and some canned veggies.  It rained about 4 drops and I drank my Perrier while everyone made fun of me for my "emergency supplies."  But hey, water is water, and if we needed it, Perrier would have worked as well as Ozarka.

So that was the flood we were prepared for that never happened.  A couple of years later, my house had the flood we were NOT prepared for thanks to tropical storm Hermine (horrible name, worse storm).  It sat over the hill country for about 27 hours, raining off an on.  But for about 5 hours, from 10PM to 3AM on September 7th, the heavens opened up above my house and the rains came down.

About 10PM I was in bed watching Rachel Zoe and Rob came in to watch the end (he secretly loves that show, I swear).  Rob said the water was almost to the porch.  At 10:30 he went to check again and opened the door to a lake.  It was about 1.5 inches from coming in the house through the front door.  We had noticed some water spots on our new wood floors earlier in the week, so we went to check the back french doors and noticed that if you smushed down on the board, water came up between the boards.  Not good.  So Rob took a push broom and started pushing water away from the front door for the next 3 hours, while I used towels to soak up the water coming in the back and occasionally went to sweep water away from the outside of those doors. 

Water never did come in the front door (thank God), but the french doors and a couple of hardwood boards near them need to be replaced.  The upside is while we were calling contractors about replacing the doors we decided to get them to bid out renovating our kitchen, so we should start that in the next week or two.

What, you wouldn't renovate a kitchen at 33 weeks pregnant?