Earlier this year, I’ve learned some valuable lessons related to home care/home improvement.

The water company came to fix/maintain a Reverse Osmosis (RO) drinking water system. Unfortunately, they were unable to fix a check valve (replacement no longer available for that particular RO system) and instead a brand new RO system was installed. After the install, the RO system operated normally and water flowed through fine without visible leaks. Because of personal issues, I had to leave for a few days. And since there were no visible leaks, I left thinking everything would be OK.

The install WAS NOT DONE properly and this would be the start of a 4 month long headache. What happened was that a connector/valve near the spigot underneath the sink was not properly screwed on tight enough. Because of how the RO system works, a leak at this area would not have been noticed until enough water had been stored in the RO reservoir and the back pressure generated would force water through the weakest link instead of the waste line. In 48 hours of not being at home, enough water had leaked out such that my downstairs neighbor called me to inform me that there was a pool of water forming in the ceiling above their kitchen. Because our layouts are similar, I knew immediately that there was a leak from the water system.

Coming home, I stopped the leak immediately and then worked to dry out the area. Overall a portion (30%?) of the hardwood floor was affected by the water leak. The water flowed underneath the raised cabinets to the back of the kitchen wall where it flowed downstairs to the neighbor’s ceiling. The kitchen sink was also damaged with both the back wall and floor board soaking wet. Since the damage has been done, my first and only thought was the potential mold growth and how to mitigate it. Even though the hardwood floor however looked undamaged, I was still afraid of any sort of mold growth. Because of the personal issue, I didn’t have time to research about the relationship between water damage extent, mold growth, mold mediation methods on hardwood floors, and other topics of interest. In my head, all I can focus on was potential mold growth and needing to mitigate it at any cost.

Calling a 3rd party that specializes in mold and water mitigation, I hired this company (let’s call them MV Constructors) to do this work. They inspected and found water damage both in the kitchen floor AND also in the floors on the other side of the kitchen. They then brought in dehumidifiers and fans to start drying out the hardwood floors. Then they started work. They ripped out both the kitchen sink area, a small portion of the hardwood floor in front of the sink and then a huge swath of the hardwood floor on the other side of the kitchen which was the living room. At least the cabinet doors were saved.

First Lesson: I should have MONITORED MV Constructors’ work. In retrospect, I should have actually asked WHAT they were going to do so I have an idea of what the damage will be.

Second Lesson: I should have asked to see the extent of the mold damage so I can assess if there was enough damage to before letting them tear apart the hardwood floors especially in the living room. Apparently there are ways to treat mold on hardwood floors without having to demolish the floor.

Third Lesson: These types of companies (like MV Constructors) that have both mitigation and rebuilding sub-companies tend to tear down and rebuild assuming that insurance will pay for it.

Now with a swath of missing flooring in the living room and a partially functioning kitchen with partially missing flooring, I had to fix this damage. MV Constructors brought out their main builder and he proceeded to just list out what needed to be fixed… tear out and replace the rest of the living room and hallway hardwood floors, tear out and replace the kitchen hardwood floor, remodel the kitchen, and redo the flooring of the laundry nook. Did he listen to me? maybe? But in retrospect, he was more or less banking on the insurance payout. My neighbor downstairs got a strange vibe off him and it turns out this builder was charged for fraud. If having personal issues wasn’t enough, now someone coming in wanting to just redo my whole living space seems a little extravagant. I opted to not go with him.

Fourth Lesson: Always double check references.

All throughout this process, I knew I was stuck in a bad mental place. In my head, I kept churning over how this should have been preventable, or how if I just went back for one night it would have been caught, or if I just turned off the water source because I didn’t have time to really test the RO system. And then as I did more research, I started to realize that the amount of demolition the company did WAS NOT needed. I also started churning over the fact that I should have monitored their work, or asked for a step by step process on how they are going to proceed. With every new information I found about water damage, mold damage and related topics, I realized how naive I have been and that just continued to churn in my head.

Fortunately, when I thought about ways to fix this damage, I became unstuck from this bad mental state. I began thinking of possible ways to fix the damage and looking to the future help me a lot. Kitchen ideas were straight forward. They include building a shelf underneath the bar height eating area or even a full kitchen remodel. Flooring was the biggest headache since both the kitchen and living room floor needed to be replaced. However, having to tear out almost 700+ sq ft of good hardwood floor in order to “fix” 100 sq ft of seems a little ridiculous. I ended up focusing on flooring ideas that just fixed the damaged portion. Ideas included tiling both damaged living room portion and the kitchen as well as more “simpler” ideas of salvaging the kitchen hardwood floor pieces and transfer them to the opposite side in order to preserve the “look”.

In the end, a trusted general contractor rebuilt everything. The kitchen was put back as is as I was able to buy replacement sinks cabinets from the original makers of the cabinets. The kitchen hardwood floors were salvaged and transferred to the living room in an attempt to preserve the overall “look” of hardwood floor. There is a visible cut line where the demolition occurred to remind me of how naive I was. The kitchen was tiled.

Fifth Lesson: When ordering custom built items, be as specific as possible. One of the cabinets should have had a shelf in the middle, but I assumed the company knew what I wanted. However as I found out when I picked up the cabinet, I never asked to have a shelf pre-built into that cabinet and hence they built it without a shelf.

All this time, I also had to deal with insurance. Fortunately, the insurance accepted the MV Constructors claims of mold/water mitigation costs. They also paid out the estimated cost for rebuilding the damage less deductible. Additionally, insurance accepted the liability claim for downstairs and also paid that out in full.

Overall, the repairs took about 4-5 days and for much less than the insurance payout. When I looked into this discrepancy, the majority of the repair cost involved replacing the hardwood floor for the living room and hallway whereas we opted to just transfer salvageable hardwood floors.

Live and Learn.