I just wanted to let you know about our flooding problem. We finally have our new carpeting and it looks great. Today they are coming to lay new tile on the bathroom floor, and will be doing the kitchen in a couple more days.
I am of course grateful that it wasn’t worse and that my family is all in tact. It is however hard to part with furniture and items that have been part of our lives many of which, since I was a kid. I just keep reminding myself that those material things would only be with me for so long anyway and I can get along perfectly fine every day without them.
In the last post I told you about what to do when it floods. I’d like to tell you what happened with my neighbors and what they did differently.
The day after we flooded my landlord asked that we pull up all the carpeting and padding. We did so because we had to stay here and didn’t want to walk on smelly wet carpet. Also he told us the sooner the floor dried the sooner we’d have new carpeting.
We pulled up the carpeting and immediately bought a couple bottles of disinfecting pine cleaner and mopped all the floors. The day after that it came to our attention that we should have used bleach, so we bought a couple gallons of it and remopped the floors. We also put some straight bleach into a spray bottle and and sprayed the corner and the edges of the floors where it was hard to mop because of carpet nails.
My neighbors refused to pull carpeting or move anything. They didn’t feel it was their job or responsibility. They moved their family to a relatives house and left the cleanup for the landlord. As a result their carpeting sat on their floors an extra day. The maintenance man went back the day after that and told us they had mold growing up the bottoms of the walls already. With their mold growth came extra cleaning and scrubbing. Also, had they been there, they most surely would have become ill.