Our disaster!

I've questioned my decision to get Scott a mountain bike for his birthday last year more than once, but he loves mountain biking and so against my better judgement I came up with the idea for all the Erickson wives to give our husbands a mountain biking trip to Moab, Utah for Christmas, something Scott almost got teary eyed over when he opened his Moab Trail book at Christmas. Now I knew I was going to be very pregnant the weekend we scheduled them to go in March, but I didn't realize that Alice would receive her mission call to Fiji and that the weekend before and after the mountain biking trip would be as busy as they turned out to be. We had Alice's open house the first weekend of March and were busy with family all weekend, the open house on Saturday, and I had New Beginnings that Sunday. I had worked really hard to get my house clean and ready for the weekend and when everyone had gone home I was feeling pretty good about things. The nursery was finished (thanks to Grandma Alice) and everything was pretty well ready for the baby.

That Monday night, March 9th, we had been invited to go out to dinner to celebrate Little Drew's 8th birthday and were more than happy to go. We were gone about two hours and when we got home our house was a disaster. Scott had used the bathroom before we left and something happened with our toilet. We had been having some trouble with the toilet in our bedroom for a while, but never could have guessed how much trouble we were about to have. Somehow the toilet clogged and then on top of that the stopper didn't work which mean that our toilet continously kept filling which meant overflowing for two hours. Our basement, other than the family room was completely flooded. So hours and four wet vacs later we had cleaned up most of the water, but because it had come through ceiling and walls of the rooms we knew we had a bigger problem than just cleaning up the water. Disaster Cleanup had to be called and rooms had to be ripped apart. Here are the pictures of what our basement looked like after 5 days of destruction and drying out.

Here is our bathroom (in our bedroom) after our tile floor and baseboards had been removed, please note that the tile had been layed and finished about two weeks before this (it was my Valentine's day present from Scott).


This is the ceiling of our downstairs bathroom. This bathroom was completely remodeled just over a year ago.

This is the wall in the girl's room where they used to have a really cute bulletin board covered in fabric and ribbon (a year old). Part of the ceiling and walls in this room had to be removed and resheetrocked also.

This is the middle bedroom downstairs where most of the water came through. The entire ceiling and almost three of the walls had to be ripped apart. We had just finished painting and decorating this room about two weeks ago. It did have a chair rail with white paint on the bottom and kind of a greyish purple on the top (it was really cute).

On top of this happening and Scott leaving for Moab that Wednesday, Cecilia got the stomach flu and I got a terrible cold. Needless to say I was a pretty big wreck while Scott was gone, but I can honestly say that I'm glad Scott went--our marriage may have ended that week otherwise. As Scott joked, "My marriage was great at 7:55 pm on Monday and at 8:00 was on the rocks."