Home Fiasco #6

We didn't learn. It's been around eight months since our move to Lebanon, and last home fiasco. We should have known that karma (or whatever spurred this chain reaction of random drama every six months) had something in store. Maybe we were distracted by my 2007 Toyota Matrix computer dying. It was a red herring (which was fixed under warranty)!

It was a gloriously sunny Saturday, and I was dreaming of spring while baking some tasty homemade treats. As I was walking around the kitchen I heard a constant drip. It sounded kind of distant, like it was coming from upstairs or inside the wall. I checked the bathroom, thinking for sure I had a toilet leak, but when I emerged from the bathroom with a smile of no-drip satisfaction, I was quickly brought back to reality. A shower was starting to soak my dining room table and floor! The water was coming out of the sides of the sprinkler system in the dining room and kitchen.

I quickly placed a large bowl (and later three trash cans) underneath the spray, called Scott to rush him home, and phoned the apartment complex maintenance number in panic.

Turns out the apartment above us had a dishwasher problem, of sorts. They didn't catch it until their entire floor was flooded, which leaked through the walls to all the apartments below. Our apartment received the most water, but the apartment below us had a little dripage too.

Which formed a nice bubble in their ceiling.

I took a video of how the water looked in our apartment during peak leakage, but the lighting is bad. You can't see the water, but you can hear it. The domed light fixture is so full of water we were worried it would burst.





Luckily, since I was home, none of our belongings were damaged. We had to wait until the water stopped and the light fixture was removed before we were able to mop up the lake on our floor. I would say that it wasn't too much to clean, but it didn't end there. A carpet cleaner ordered by the complex came that night to soak up any water in the carpet. Then maintenance came by on Tuesday and tore up our floors and ceilings to expose and dump all the wet and damaged insulation. We are still living in just a piece of an apartment with boxes all around us.

As we mopped up massive amounts of water last Saturday, Scott and I reminisced of the time when our kitchen flooded in our first apartment because of rain. I do feel some satisfaction in the fact that none of our home fiascos were self-inflicted. Not much, though.

Stay tuned for our update this Fall. We'll be expecting it.