If you read this post or this post, you know that 
This is truly something that I wouldn't wish upon anyone. The smell alone from the wet carpet and pad is enough to make your insides curdle.
Luckily we were able to get most of the water out of the way and a restoration crew was on site within a couple of hours getting to work. When I last left you, they had been running their dehumidifier and blower equipment for about a day.
Thursday morning I decided to stay home from work while
Now that things were starting to get dry, they had the task of removing the pad from under the carpet and exposing the wall studs to allow them to dry. The project manager had told me the day of the incident that carpet pads are made up of a lot of recycled materials so when they get wet, they smell to high heaven.
You can see in the picture above and in the next series of photos the amount material that needed to be removed. After they had everything pulled up and away they let their equipment run for the next three days.
The amount of destruction is pretty substantial. It feels like it is never going to be back to normal at this point. Either that or we still have a long way to go to get there. I had to shut the air ducts in the upper part of the house because the smell was coming through the vents.
On Thursday morning
It was a pretty quick and easy process to get it started again and after about an hour or so we had hot water again.
We were supposed to go away this past weekend to visit my inlaws down in Ohio, but because of all the equipment running in our basement we didn't want to risk the chance of their being a fire. That would have been pretty ironic given how the situation started.
Saturday we did get a chance to get out of the house for a little bit and spend some time together which was really nice. We just needed to take a step away from the whole situation to clear our heads and collect ourselves.
Saturday afternoon was an extremely hard time going through the stuff in the garage and deciding what to throw away and what to keep. There were some tears shed for sure.
The workers set up some of the machinery so it would blow under the carpet to get things as dry as possible. By Monday the smell had diminished quite a bit, but it was still there. The workers came early in the morning and as soon as they arrived, I headed off to work. When I returned home, they had pulled all of their equipment and the carpet was laid back down in place.
The fact that their equipment was gone means that they hit the magic number of 14% humidity in the basement. Any higher than that and they would have left things running to make sure that mold could not grow.
I had told the workers that because of cost concerns it would be nice to keep the carpet. However, If they couldn't guarantee the smell will go away then I wanted it gone and I would deal with the financial impact later.
I am waiting to hear where we go from here. I am guessing they will either pull out the carpet or install a new pad underneath the old carpet and then clean it. At some point we need to have the walls re-dry-walled and painted and I have already been on the phone getting quotes to have our furnace inspected and a backup sump pump installed to hopefully avoid future incidents.
I still haven't gotten a cost yet, but hopefully it comes in lower than what our insurance is willing to cover. I promise you, more updates will follow for sure. This has been a huge impact on