The Good and Bad of Home Ownership . . .

We have lived in our current home for almost 8 years. The carpet upstairs, after years of use by our children, daycare/preschool kids, and a dog had, shall we say, seen MUCH better days. We saved up and budgeted for new flooring this year. It took us awhile to decide what to get, and even longer to finally get it scheduled, but we finally got it done last week. I LOVE it.

Here is the carpet in the bedroom.

In the carpet.

And in the living room/playroom.

So that's the good.



And the bad . . .

Yesterday, we had a HUGE rainstorm. I've never seen rain come down so hard in such a short time. I heard a noise from the girls room and I thought they had left their window open. I opened the door and went over to the window, and just as I did, mud poured up and over the window sill and through the closed window.

If there is anything good in this situation, it is that there was a bed underneath the window with bedding on it, and most of the water and mud was absorbed in the bedding and the towels, etc. that we were using against the window. So we have very little damage inside the house.

But there is lots of bad. The window well bulged and the bolts came out of the foundation and the seal broke on the window wells. And it happened on the other window well on that side of the house too (although no mud got through that window.) And unfortunately, it isn't just a matter of putting in new window wells. We will need to excavate the dirt on that side of the house and figure out WHY there was water running down the sides of the window wells, what caused the window wells to bulge and break under the pressure, and we will need to fix that problem (which could be a foundation problem), and then replace the window wells, fill in the area, seed or sod.

None of this is covered by our homeowners insurance because it is considered a settlement/foundation/maintenance issue.

The construction company that built our house (8 years ago) went bankrupt 5 years ago.

The money that we had saved for home issues was spent last weekend on new carpet.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the window well problems -


The is the window that had mud pouring into the house.

We had people dig outside on the side of the window wells where the seal broke.

Here it is from the inside. The other window is actually much worse. The area that is separated and bulging is about two feet long. (It is also the window that had mud coming inside.)