Happy Thanksgiving...to us!

Daniel and I were excited for out first Thanksgiving together, but it didn’t end up being as relaxing and fun as we were expecting. In fact, this is how our Thanksgiving ended.

But to really give you and idea of what our holiday was really like, I need to start at the beginning.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, we started doing a major home improvement project at our house – the family room. We decided to repaint and install laminate floors. We ripped all the carpet out and started painting our house the weekend before Thanksgiving. My family came over to help paint. In the process, Daniel and Jon ended up working on our bathroom sink (you might be wondering how painting led to a plumbing project, but one things always leads to another :) ). Daniel spent the next day fixing the sink, and now it works like a charm!! He is so handy!

Here is a before picture of the family room.

Here is a picture of Daniel working on the sink.

We felt pretty good about what we accomplished that weekend, especially considering the unexpected plumbing issue. I really wanted to get the floors done and the house back together before Thanksgiving so that I could pull out all the Christmas decorations after Thanksgiving. We got some stuff done on Monday, but then Daniel had to work late Tuesday, so that left Wednesday. Daniel and I both got off early that day so we got started.

The first couple of rows took a little while, but then we started getting the hang of it. We got about 4-5 rows done before we called it quits for the day.

The next day we slept in and went over to my mom’s for Thanksgiving dinner. It was delicious and we all ate too much. Daniel and I decided to go home and work on the floor for a little bit and convinced my mom to go with us and just hang out while we worked. Well, this is when everything went wrong. We had just pulled into the driveway when our neighbor came running over and told us that our window wells were full of water. We rushed inside and here are some pictures of what we found.

If you can't tell, that is our window well, full of water!

Needless to say, we spent the rest of our Thanksgiving vacuuming up all of the water out of our basement. We figure we rung at least a 100 gallons of water, and the carpet pad was still sopping wet.



By the end of the night, we were all tired, wet and cold, but very thankful that we came home when we did. It could have been much worse. We pulled up all of the pad and pulled it into the storage room that has a drain and put fans all over to try and dry out the carpet. The next morning we woke up to a house that looked like a tornado had gone off. The house was already displaced, our family room was in the living room, but now we also had our basement in the kitchen, not to mention all the dust and mud that were now tracked all over the house.

Daniel and I were going to go to his family’s house for the rest of the weekend, but now we needed to stick around and deal with the insurance. The insurance company sent a restoration company over and Daniel and I worked on the family room floor while they worked in the basement. The floor went very fast, we didn’t have many unusual cuts or jogs, so the majority of the floor went fast. By about 2:30-3:00, this is what our floor looked like and the basement was full of fans, with a dehumidifier to suck all the water out of the basement, 20 oz per hour.

By this point, we felt like everything was going to be okay in the basement, but this is when we ran into some snags on the flooring. It took almost 3 hours to finish the last row of the floor. This was definitely a trial. We all had different ideas on how it should be done, and we were all tired, so the air got a little tense. Jonathan ended up coming over and he and Daniel were finally able to figure it out and it looks fantastic!

Daniel and I have been through a lot already together, but this weekend, with natural disasters and major home improvement projects was certainly a test. We are proud to say that despite everything that happened, we went to bed speaking every night and we are still in madly in love!

Now the weekend is over and we need another weekend before we go back to work, but we won’t get it. We do have a great family room to hang out in now and it was all worth it! Here is the final result of the family room.