Masters of Disaster

PSA Home Edition Part 2

So here’s the situation: it’s 5:20 a.m. on a Monday and your hot water tank has given up the ghost in a spectacular manner all over your house. You are standing in two inches of cold water. Who you gonna call?

I called my insurance company and while I waited for their call back I texted a friend who is both and early riser and good in emergencies. Within five minutes she had texted me back saying she was on her way with a jumbo sized, water-sucking shop vac. So for the next two hours she and my son hauled most of the furniture out of the house and began the task of sucking untold gallons of water from the floors—did I mention she is good at both the friend thing and the emergency thing? I spent my time on the phone answering questions and finding out that the insurance company and the company they hired to “clean and restore” my home would both be at my home by 10:30. (Yay!) The cavalry was on its way . . . or so I thought.

My insurance company was wonderful throughout the entire process, but the restoration company was a disaster. “The Masters of Disaster” as I came to call them, seemed more interested in playing basketball on my court and adjusting the hoop height than they were about pulling out my appliances and drying the floors and walls behind them. I asked repeatedly that they pull out the dishwasher and check for water damage. They assured me that they had checked and it was fine. They assured me that they had removed the flooring underneath the appliances, but on Saturday when my family and I were repainting the house my son pulled out the dishwasher—low and behold there was water, unremoved flooring and what appeared to be mold on the wall behind the dishwasher. Lovely.

So here’s your PSA for this week: have friends that are good with emergencies, sons that are strong –or furniture that is light. And never hire a company that uses all your good towels to clean up a secondary flood they caused mid-week in your mostly dry house, pees in your toilet for a week without flushing it, and not only doesn’t do the job they were hired to do, but lies about it. And if you do hire them, I recommend never leaving them unsupervised.