Skip to main content

Fire Update

Thanks so much for your thoughts and prayers. We have good news- the ServePro company has finished the smoke/fire clean up stage 1 earlier than expected. They finished last night and so we have been able to return home today. This entire restoration process has been fascinating to watch. Wednesday the duct cleaning people subcontracted by ServePro began their work. They used special equipment to clean our entire heating/cooling system and then sealed off the vents with fancy filters [haha they just used cheesecloth]. Wednesday was also the day the dry cleaning company came and picked up items from the house for cleaning. Thursday morning ServePro began their detailed cleaning. It took them two 8-10 hour days to complete the entire job.

We will not have use of our kitchen until the contractors complete their work, but we can at least sleep in our own beds. Except that we have no sheets or pillows or towels. The dry cleaning company our insurance company hired has taken ALL fabric out of the house to treat for smoke removal with the exception of some clothes in our closet for us to wear and the earliest they will be finished is Wednesday. So we will need to go to Wal-mart and pick up some linens for temporary use. We also have no privacy downstairs as they stripped and discarded all of our blinds.

The cleaning company (ServePro) was amazing. They cleaned EVERY surface, item, shelf, drawer, etc etc in the entire house. It is as if Cinderella has been here. Spotless. For this they charged our insurance company $5000, plus we paid our $1000 deductible to them as well. The duct cleaning was another $1800 billed directly to our insurance company.

Unfortunately, now that the cleaning company has finished, the extent of the damage is highlighted clearly. The countertops and cabinets are toast. Our garbage disposal is junked because the firemen dropped a lot of glass from the microwave into the sink during their visit. The linoleum floor has permanent soot marks (The Pergo in the dining room is ok yay!). The ceilings and walls are still blackened throughout the downstairs of the home so it will need a complete repaint job and some of them may need re-drywalling. And obviously as part of the restoration we will be getting new smoke detectors and a fire extinguisher.

We had a laugh when reading the list of unrecoverable items as inventoried by ServePro. They listed our chile ristra as a “bell pepper hanging ornament”.

We will keep you updated on the adventure that is sure to be the contractor’s restoration job which begins Monday.

Never ever ever leave a pan with oil unattended. This is a lesson brought to you by my cautionary tale. Right up there with never ever walk across an attic floor that hasn’t been finished. Every year I learn new and valuable things the hard way.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Board Game Review: Expeditions Gears of Corruption

L ast year I reviewed Expeditions and ranked it #1 among all Stonemaier games on account of the challenging intellectual puzzle it presents. This year I have played my way through the new expansion, Gears of Corruption , and I’m delighted to let you know that it makes the base game even better. That the expansion so cohesively builds on the base game should not be a surprise to anyone who closely examines the original box for Expeditions. All expansion components perfectly fit in that box including the 2 new mechs that nestle in the placeholder cubbies clearly made for them.  That can’t be coincidence. There might a few features rolled into Corruption of Gears that were developed as a result of consumer feedback on the base game (I’m looking at you, wild meeple), but my theory is that Stonemaier did a Lord of the Rings maneuver with this game and its expansions, designing the entire game with most of the additions integrated up front, and then breaking it into base + expansions fo...

Board Game Review: Expeditions

Expeditions is my favorite game in the Stonemaier Games portfolio to date. The game is a sequel to Scythe, and continues the narrative years in the future. It has taken everything I loved in Scythe and expanded on it, while chucking out everything I didn’t care for (the combat). Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, Expeditions brings us into an age when a meteorite has crash landed into Siberia and things begin to go sideways for all who encounter it. One team after another sets out to investigate the crash site and they are never heard from again. No one knows what happened to them. Now it’s our turn to find out what’s really going on, each of us leading a competing expedition team into Siberia to bring back desperately needed answers. During a game of Expeditions, all players are seated around the game board, which is made up of individually placed hex tiles laid out as shown above. At the bottom of the game board is an insert affectionately known as the base camp. The base camp holds ...

A Fortunate Trade, an Unexpected Pledge of Support, and a Win for Yin!

What follows is the true and unredacted account of my tour of duty as a command leader for the Yin Brotherhood. Map: 5p POK Kazadoom’s Notch Map generated on https://ti4-map-generator.derekpeterson.ca/ Factions: Yin, Yssaril, Nekro, Vuil’raith, Hacan. Round 1 objectives: Engineer a Marvel (R1-1); Push Boundaries (R1-2) Five experienced leaders gathered this weekend to prove themselves worthy. As the Yin, I found myself wedged between the Hacan (around the corner of a notch in the galaxy) and the Yssaril. Word had come down to the Blessed on Darien through our ambassadors and spies that both nearby factions were set on amassing larger fleets and armies, but to what end we were unsure. The Blessed discussed the matter at great length and decided our best defense was to rebuild our flagship the Van Hauge and to take control of as many planets as we could (more, at least, then our neighbors). That would allow us to stand firm in the face of any aggression. As a command leader, I...