Over 300 Restaurants in 5 Months

LAST MEAL AT HOME
The story starts with our Holiday dinner. All the relatives... My husband, David, looked down and saw our darkened wood floor and called me. He knew the signs of water damage and it didn’t look pretty. Some quick detection work led us to the kitchen where water was actually dripping out of the ceiling soffet. The drywall squished in with my finger. All this, right in the middle of making Baked Alaska! We had just had a slab leak, so we called the same plumber. He came, happy to get a piece of cake, and cut a hole in our ceiling to fix the pinhole in the copper pipe that was spraying water out. I was still trying to get over the other 15 holes in our house from the slab leak, but deep down, I knew this was worse.

 RESTORATION & MOLD
The plumber gave me the name of a restoration guy and said to call him before we called our insurance. We followed his advice and Robert was signed up the next day. He discovered all the places the water damage had actually traveled. It was like playing hide and seek. The water went down both directions of our soffet, down the walls, and back up again. It soaked under our travertine floor, the cabinets, the wall and the wood floors on the other side of the drywall encased post. Inside the soffet, mold had grown as fast as Robert and crew was able to knock down the walls. David and I were happy we had contacted Robert; he knew he had to “act” responsibly to avoid any more damage, take photos, and call the Hazmat people for mold testing. The kitchen had over 100,000 mold spores! Full containment was needed — the space suits, showers in and out of the house, scraping of wood, removal of all floors etc… Our young sons could not use the family room (i.e. T.V.) for about 3 days. This spelled disaster. The furniture got moved to a PODS on our driveway.

 THE GOOD NEWS
Robert told us we have “Loss of Use” through our insurance. This means we can eat out, through our insurance, for the time that we can’t use our kitchen. Our insurance agent, Allison, confirmed.  April 2010; I don’t think I will ever forget her words. “You can get appetizers, desserts and even a glass of wine.” This was too good to be true! I adore going to restaurants. This meant no shopping, no cooking, or cleaning… Now, don’t get me wrong, I love to cook. Well, I did before my kids got so picky. My husband’s not too easy to cook for either. So lately, all the fun of cooking’s been slowly drained out of me. I was due for a break. Hey, this way I can order what my kids call ‘fancy stuff’. We set up a breakfast nook for when the boys’ were at school. For the rest of our meals, it was restaurants all the way!

 5 MONTHS LATER
It is now September. This has taken far longer than we had ever thought it would. We are just getting started with the construction. We’ve gained weight, but have a lot of fun stories eating at so many restaurants. That’s over 300 restaurants! We also have good tips and stories for our construction. Please follow us on our journey...