Construction Hell, Pt. 2

The nice folks at Servicemaster finished mitigating the flood damage in mid-March. We had been living at a Mag-Mile hotel for the previous 2 months. As the hotel staff informed us, this kind of thing happens all the time: family has some kind of home disaster, insurance company puts them up in a hotel until the clean-up and construction is finished, clean-up and construction takes double the estimated time, family commits suicide by eating at the Cheesecake Factory…

Upon our return home, we were greeted with a lovely new hardwood floor, beautiful and flat, no sign of previous water damage or any other developer shenanigans. We blissfully ignored the floors until sometime at the beginning of May I noticed the floors cupping a bit. I called the guys from Servicemaster who came out to check the floors. They said that it was probably ok and we should just set up a dehumidifier. We bought two. I was hoping for a miracle – but I knew deep down that our floors were just as fucked up as before the flood.

By July our floors were insane. I called Servicemaster and got no answer for 3 weeks – I had to keep leaving sheepish voice mails on the guy’s phone. By the middle of August I finally got a hold of him again and he came back out to look at the damage. We were screwed.

I freaked out. WTF? We just had the floors put in a mere 6 months prior and they were worse than they were before the flood. I began calling basement waterproofing contractors like a mad-woman. We saw 3 different contractors, and an independent inspector. The answer was the same – “you need a sump pump m’am.” Even better: these guys didn’t do anything but the sump pump…We needed to arrange for a floor guy to help us too. I had become a general contractor in less than an afternoon.

The endless parade of contractors and quotes came streaming in. The damage was going to be around $15,000. Not good. Making matters worse, my next-door neighbor came to me and mentioned that she’s having water issues with her hard wood floors too. Fuck. Having a sump pump installed in both units was going to be upwards of $30,000. Monster Special Assessment here we come!

I broke the news to the condo association board (of which I’m a member, btw.) They took it better than I thought. We also made the executive decision to take care of our unit first and then we’d revisit my neighbor’s unit next year…the association just didn’t have the dough to do both units, and nobody wanted to ask the residents for a special assessment that was almost $5000.

Arrangements were made, checks were cut. And here we are. I’m hoping that this is all over by the beginning of November. We’ll see.