Last Tues morning at 3:05 am

I haven't been reading the board much lately. In fact, I haven't been doing much of anything other than work, sleep and dealing with an event that occurred last week.

I woke up at said time to the sound of what I thought was rain drops. Since it had rained very hard here in DFW the night before, I didn't think much of it. However, it didn't sound "right" - the rain sounded louder than normal. So I listened for a minute and decided that the rain was coming from inside the house. I went out of our bedroom, through the family room into the kitchen, where the rain sounds were extremely loud. I turned on a light and saw....

water pouring out of the light fixture I had turned on. I looked down and saw that I was standing in water. I looked around and water was coming out of most of the light fixtures in the kitchen. I ran upstairs and the landing area was drenched. I turned on a light and water was coming out of the little closet where our water heater is. I opened the closet and water was just pouring out of the bottom of it. I tried to turn the water off via the cut off value, but it didn't work. After trying to turn the water off to the entire house (which is at the street at the meter which was under water because of the rain the night before), I got a hose and was going to drain the water heater using the hose value at the base of the water heater (until I could get the water turned off). I was going to run the hose from the water heater to the tub in the upstairs bathroom - when I tried to attache the hose, that part blew out and a jet stream of water started spewing out against the opposite wall. I finally got a wrench and used it to turn off the water to the heater.

When I went downstairs to the kitchen, water was still coming out of the light fixtures and there was about a 1/4" of standing water in the entire kitchen. That water went out into the dining room and out into the wood floors of the family room. Ceilings, walls, carpet....well, I think you get the picture. C was out-of-town all that week at a sales meeting, so she could only use her imagination to picture what the house looked like. By the time she got home, all the water and wet and the like was gone, so it didn't look as bad as she expected. Basically every room in our house except for our upstairs computer room, our downstairs master bedroom and master bath were effected in some way. The walls and ceiling in the kitchen as well. We won't know the full extent until 1) everything is dried out and 2) a claims person assesses the damage.

A water removal company has been out here since 10am that day trying to dry out everything. At one point, we had over 25 fans, blowers and dehumidifiers in the house. Plus, these weird looking floor-mats that are all over the wood floors sucking the water out from under them. The new paint job we had done a year ago in most of indoors - ruined probably. The new floor we had just put in the week before in the upstairs bathroom - too soon to tell. C mandated that we had to get a tank-less water heater installed - I don't want to get into how much that cost (while our insurance will cover damages from the water, they won't cover the cost to replace the thing that caused it).

The insurance claims person comes out Friday to assess the damage and start the process of repairs/replacement. C and I are getting geared up for that fight. Hopefully it won't be as I expect it will be. Supposedly State Farm (our insurance) is #1 in customer satisfaction. We'll see...