Water leak mitigation progress, or: Everybody wants my money.

Life is calming down at last here at La Casa Cantwell. (I should probably follow local tradition and redub the place La Casita de los Cantwell, except that it's not a traditional casita, being a condo and all. Anyway.) 

Alert hearth/myth readers will recall that early last month, the plumbing in the unit upstairs from mine sprung a leak, and Tigs and I decamped to the Santa Fe Hilton for almost a week on my insurance company's dime, while a crew cut holes in my ceilings and fired up big fans and dehumidifiers to dry the place out.

Then came the ceiling repairs, the wall and ceiling texturing (this place is textured to within an inch of its life -- welcome to Santa Fe!) and painting, and the ripping out of the trashed carpet and the installation of vinyl plank flooring in the bedroom and office/craft room. (This is the second time this year that the upstairs neighbor's bathroom has leaked. I'd be an idiot to put carpeting down again.) All the work was finished this week -- hooray! Well, except for some molding for the thresholds that didn't arrive 'til yesterday, but I can't imagine that installation will take very long. Here's the bedroom now, with the new paint and flooring (please excuse the mess): 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

I like to think Tigs is approving of everything here, but it's possible he was just glad the noise had stopped. It has been a challenging few weeks for him: Every day, he'd get locked in bathroom; strange noises kept happening, and strange men would occasionally pop in to do things in his sanctum sanctorum; and then Mama would let him out and the house would be DIFFERENT. Poor little guy. When he wasn't stuck in the bathroom, he was usually on top of the kitchen cabinets.

The office/craft room is a completely different color now. The crew manager offered to match the old paint for me, but I demurred. I mean, I didn't loathe that watermelon-something-or-other accent wall in the office... 

That's the original accent wall on the right. Not a hue I would have picked. Ever.
Lynne Cantwell 2021

...but I wasn't going to turn down an offer to get rid of it. Now the whole room is this color: 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

I'm going to enjoy working in this room now.

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You're wondering where the money comes in, aren't you?

I'm not sure why, but my insurance company apparently handled this claim in a much different way than is typical of these types of claims. I have zero complaints about the way State Farm has handled this, by the way. None. They were johnny-on-the-spot, suggesting contractors, issuing the first round of payments, and pursuing my neighbor's insurance for repayment. But I'm gathering that in these types of situations, usually the insurance company hires the contractor and pays them directly. I don't know whether it's a quirk in New Mexico law or something to do with my policy, but in this case, they had me hire the contractor and sent the checks to me.

So there was a delay of a couple of weeks, after ServPro came and took back their big fans and stuff, while I lived with holes in my ceilings and trashed carpet on the floors. I couldn't figure out what the holdup was. Why were we not starting with the repairs?

It turned out that ServPro was waiting for the paper check that State Farm had sent me. When it arrived, I promptly deposited it, then wrote a check to ServPro. The crew chief seemed disappointed; usually, he told me, people just sign the check over to them.

So when the second check came, I endorsed it and handed it to him. He got all the way back to his office before he called me: he couldn't cash this check because it was made out only to me. Well, yes, I said; so was the last one. So he drove out again to give it back to me, so I could deposit it and write him a check. (Yes, I know, I could have written "Pay to the order of ServPro" above my endorsement. For whatever reason, he didn't want to do it that way.)

But that's not all. Yesterday, I got a weird letter in the mail from my mortgage company. I had to read the thing twice before I could figure out what they were talking about. They were telling me that I could take the check from my insurance company to one of their branches and have it endorsed there. By them. So I could cash it expeditiously.

So apparently sometimes, insurance companies make out the check to your mortgage company as well as to you? And maybe also your contractor? Or rather, their contractor? Huh. This is a whole new world

I'm glad to have it all straight now, finally, because there's one more payment coming. It'll be interesting to see who this check is made out to.

And I really hope I never have to go through this again (and so does Tigs!).

***

I'm stoked about the color of the accent wall in my bedroom, even though my headboard doesn't work with it. I'm going to make a new headboard, since the premade ones I like are either too plain or ridiculously expensive. Of course I will post about the process. Stay tuned.

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These moments of freshly painted and floored blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Taking a week to breathe.

 

lineartestpilot | Deposit Photos

I used this graphic a few weeks back for a post about the most recent congressional debt ceiling brinkmanship. But it feels appropriate on a personal level right now. 

I mentioned last week that I was dealing with a water leak from the apartment above mine. Tigs and I spent four days this week staycating (I just now decided that "staycation" can be a verb) at a hotel in town, while I shuttled back and forth between the hotel, the office (for work), the apartment (to let various insurance people and demolition crews in), and the timeshare where my kids were staying -- because of course the leak happened just as I was picking them up from the airport for a one-week stay. We didn't lose much of anything (I am a veteran of moth infestations and leaky rental unit basements, so I store virtually everything in plastic containers), but it's still been disruptive. 

And there's more to come. Right now, there are large holes in the ceilings of both bedrooms, both bedroom closets, the utility closet, and the hallway. The wall-to-wall carpet in both bedrooms is ruined, the bedrooms need to be repainted, and my medicine cabinet is trashed. And of course all the stuff that I'd stored in the closets is scattered around the apartment. In a word, it's pretty chaotic here right now.

In addition, I'm also expecting that my deck will be dismantled this summer to get at a leak on the roof below it that's impacting the apartment below mine. I figure the ceiling repairs and bedroom remodeling will be finished at about the time the deck work begins.

I'm lucky in that insurance will pay for the ceilings and bedrooms, and the condo association will pay for the deck and roof work.

But still, I am not in the best of head spaces right now. Plus I have a lot of extra stuff to do. So I'm taking this week off from blogging. 

I hope to be back at it next week. In the meantime, here's a picture of Tigs -- who, like me, is happy to be back home, however chaotic it is right now. 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

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These moments of messy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!