Lemons

We’ve all heard the saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”  That’s what I’m trying to do.  Our house in Kansas has finally been rented out, thank goodness.  We couldn’t sell it before we PCSed to New York.  Last summer the basement flooded from a torrential rain storm.  It took a lot of work and headache to get it back to normal, especially with Chad being in Iraq at the time.  Earlier this week, the same thing happened again. 

Luckily the renters had not yet moved in.  Actually they were just getting to the house and the realtor let them in.  They did a walk through and discovered the flooded basement.  The realtor called around and only one company answered the phone.  They came out and removed the water and carpet and it’s now all dry.  The cost was way more than what we were expecting for the water removal but there’s not much we can do.  Thankfully it was caught in time to save the walls.  I still don’t know the final cost of that work yet but the estimates were pretty high. 

Now we have the task of finding flooring to put back into the basement bedrooms.  The silver lining in all of this is that we do have the money and it won’t hurt us really at all.  A week ago we finally received the dity money we had been waiting on for 2 months and it’s more than enough to cover the costs of these repairs.  It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it? 

It’s still a headache trying to figure all of this out, but at least it’s not financially crippling for us.  Our next challenge will be finding a reasonable landlord insurance policy to replace our homeowners policy since we aren’t living in the house.