You know how you have a picture in your mind of how a holiday is going to go? I did for Valentine’s Day. I was making Chicken Cacciatore ala Slow Cooker and the perfect Tiramisu cake. We were going to have a nice bottle of Peach Moscato to go with our salad. We were going to have an easy day because of the incoming rain, stay in, watch a movie and enjoy each others company.
Well, Mother nature had another plan!
I had just started the slow cooker with dinner and was sitting down to have my second cup of coffee before I went to shower. The rain started dumping in buckets and the winds picked up beyond belief – so much so that I moved to the other side of the room and away from my favorite windows because the wind was actually a little scary. Tornado warnings started coming across my phone fast and furiously abut that time and then I heard water pouring into my laundry area through the ceiling. If that wasn’t bad enough, water also started pouring in through the window I had just moved away from.
Wasn’t much we could do besides grab a bunch of towels and wait it out. I did call the roofer to put him on alert.
Once the worst was over, hubby went up into the attic to assess the damage and the roofer showed up almost immediately to replace the shingles and fix the roof. That was the easy part.
Fortunately we had just recently bought a new box of contractor heavy duty bags. We then spent yesterday in the attic trying to clean up the mess of wet insulation. Up until now we had pretty much ignored the attic because we didn’t plan on using it, only clearing away around the opening and air conditioning area, but yesterday we found some really odd things up there. The bricks we found were the oddest things. We also found some disassembled OLD, and I do mean OLD cabinets, disassembled bookshelves, old paneling as well as a “roll” of 40 year old linoleum.
Compared to other areas around town that were hit with the “tornado weather”, we got off easy. Just a bunch of clean up and repair, but no real substantial loss besides our time. Seven 55 gallon bags later we called it a day and showered BIG time!
We spent today dealing with the window leak. It’s a 40 year old window that was installed into a brick wall 40 years ago without any insulation or flashing.We have completed the inside repairs and after a bit more dry out will also seal everything from the outside.
Fortunately, we were home when this all happened and were able to get the church pew and great grandma’s quilts away from the leak.
On the up side I was able to get the spice cabinets organized and cleaned up.
