I got an email from my mum this morning with the subject line “Disaster”. She managed to flood her house overnight (how is a different story that perhaps I won’t share publicly, to save her from even more people knowing), which resulted in significant damage to her bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, family room and dining room. Sounds like her whole house, right? Her other three bedrooms, two bathrooms and her storage room were spared.
She lives in Langley and it was really hard for me to be here, a ferry ride away, feeling pretty helpless. I could have taken the ferry and gone over, but what would I have done? I suppose provide some moral support but she was remarkably calm about the whole thing and seemed to be holding it together. She was also exhausted as she did about four hours of clean up on her own, so perhaps she was too tired to care. To give you an idea of the amount of water, the bottom drawer of her stove was FULL, and part of the ceiling in her kitchen had collapsed.
Greg also offered to go over, and I thought he actually might be a bit more helpful from a practical point of view (and perhaps emotional as well, since all I succeeded in doing over the phone with her was to point out the electrocution hazard).
Anyway, thankfully she was able to contact the insurance company, and a representative from both the insurance company and the restoration company were there this afternoon assessing the damage. They assured her that twice a week they get calls from people who have flooded their house by accident. I thought that was a nice thing to say.
They are drying the house out now, but then they are kicking her out for a week, so she’s coming over here. I’m glad we can do something. But this is a prime example of a situation where, if we lived in the same city, we could be that much more available to help her. She is in the process of trying to sell her house and move over here (and the facelift the house is going to get may help that!), but it can’t happen too soon for me!