Genesis 6-8: The Flood

We arrived home at our Colorado apartment around 2:45 pm last Sunday afternoon. We'd had a wonderful time in Iowa (as you can read about here), but we were ready to relax on Sunday evening in order to be ready to get back to the grindstone on Monday.

We opened the door to our apartment and were almost blown away by the awful stench of mildew. Uh oh. While we were in Iowa it had rained heavily in the Denver area every single day, and we had already heard that a few ground-floor apartments had suffered some flooding. Looks like ours needed to be added to that list. Now, when I say "flooding," you're probably tempted to think of standing water and our stuff floating around the room. It wasn't like that at all. In fact, there wasn't really anything visible at all that looked flooded. However, the carpet was wet or damp all over our apartment, and the smell was pretty bad.

We called our apartment complex and told them what was going on. Since the maintenance guys aren't around on Sundays, we knew we might not have anyone come out very soon. The woman at the office said she'd see if a maintenance guy was already on the premises so he could come take a look. After hanging up, we turned on our air conditioning (it had also been hot while we were gone... and has continued that trend). We soon found out that the AC wasn't working properly either. We called again, and they said someone was on his way.

So, Sunday evening our maintenance guys did some work on our AC, then, with our help, moved most of our furniture off our carpet (quite a task - the only parts of our unit that are NOT carpeted are the tiny bathroom and the kitchen), ripped it up, and took the padding out from underneath. They left us with about 6 industrial carpet-drying fans running, and a dehumidifier. Our bed was covered with stuff we'd had to lift off the floor, and our whole apartment smelled sickeningly like mildew. We couldn't stay there. One of the maintenance guys had assured us that the apartment complex would compensate us for expenses if we had to get a hotel or something. So we got a hotel room (fortunately, we had done laundry before leaving Iowa, so our already-packed bag was all we needed when we left our apartment). Elizabeth's brother, Clay, was in town visiting, so we arranged to meet up with him for some supper. It was really fun.

Monday, Elizabeth had to go to work. I ran some errands and did some work of my own. By late Monday afternoon, we discovered that no further work had been done on our apartment that day. We were going to have to find a hotel again, and we had no guarantees that we would be compensated. I booked a room on Hotels.com (the ONLY room I could find in the city that was available for less than $350). When we got to the hotel, they told us that they'd been booked up for hours and didn't have any record of my reservation. I sat waiting for someone to answer the phone at Hotels.com for more than a half hour before we decided we had to find somewhere else to stay. It was about 8 pm. Thankfully, our pastor and his wife had offered their spare bedroom for us, so we headed toward their place. As we were getting settled there, I got a call back from a woman at Hotels.com who spent eleven and a half minutes apologizing to me for what had happened.

Tuesday we both went to work again. Elizabeth was able to get part of the day off, and I finished up my work as quickly as I could so we could try to hang out with Clay some more, AND make sure they were doing something to our apartment so that we could live in it again. We DID get to hang out with Clay for a couple of hours, and when we got back to our apartment they had installed brand new carpet. The mildew smell had been (mostly) replaced by a new carpet smell. Finally, we could sleep in our own bed. (By the way, our apartment complex is reducing our rent to compensate us for our inconvenience and expenses, but the amount they're giving us won't quite cover what we were put out.)

Of course, now we were realizing that our AC still wasn't in working order. We had a very warm night's sleep Tuesday night.

Wednesday they came to work on the AC some more. The guy made it so that it was COLD air coming out of the vents, but it still wasn't coming out very forcefully, and was therefore doing little good. We had another warm night on Wednesday night.

By the time we got home after work on Thursday, he had come to finish up the AC work. Finally, Thursday night was nice and cool and comfortable.

Friday morning when we woke up we realized that the carpet near the utility closet where the AC unit sits was wet. Something was leaking. So another maintenance phone call was placed. When we got home from work on Friday, everything had been fixed, but the maintenance guy(s?) had made a huge mess, tracking mud and grass and dirt all over our new carpet and through our kitchen and somehow making a mess on our counter tops as well.

So, I sit here on Saturday morning, thankful that after almost a week of being home from vacation, it looks like things are pretty much back to normal.

Of course, during the new carpet/furniture moving operation a few of our bookshelves got destroyed, so now there are books sitting all over our apartment with nowhere else to be placed...