A New Living Room!

When we went to Utah in July we asked my brother to house sit. He was more than happy to, until a couple days after we left when the shower started leaking into the living room below. There wasn't too much water, so he cleaned it up and the next day used a different shower. Same thing happened, only this time a lot worse. He sent us this picture of our living room ceiling:

We aplogized profusely that he had to deal with the problem and immediately got on the phone with our insurance agent to report the damage and find out the procedure for getting money to repair it. We ended up waiting until we got home to deal with all of that, instead of trying to do it all over the phone and making my brother deal with letting people into the house.

We had a couple of plumbers come give us estimates and chose one we liked. He found a small leak in the drain pipe, caused by the shower not being sealed properly when it was put in. At some point someone discovered this and just put a rag in to soak up the water. So he fixed it and we were excited to use our shower again. And then the next day after we showered water was leaking through the ceiling again. So the plumber came back and discovered that it wasn't that leak that had caused all the damage, but a nail that had penetrated intothe main drain pipe when the floor was put in. So the whole time we lived here, who knows how long before that, water had been pooling in the ceiling every time we showered! It was amazing that there wasn't any mold!
So here's what the ceiling looked like after looking for and fixing the two leaks:

It took us a lot longer to find a contractor who was reasonably priced and we felt comfortable with. Then it took awhile before we decided exactly what we were going to do. There was a TINY bit of damage to the floor and we couldn't decide what to do about that. We finally decided to do nothing. So then it took awhile for the contractor to have time to come do the work. Luckily that gave us plenty of time to pick a new wall color, because that was quite a process!
Here are the walls covered in samples:

We finally picked a color and got a start date scheduled. And of course it took longer than we anticipated. Lauren and I spent the first couple of day away from the house to avoid the dust and fumes, but that got old, so the last two days we spend holed up in the master bedroom.

Here's what our kitchen and dining area looked like for a week:

                                                        Lauren thought it was very weird.

The new ceiling is up!

 

And the painting is finally done!

 

 

We're still working on moving the furniture back in, we left most of it out to leave room for the Christmas tree. It was such a relief to have it done and we're so happy with the new look!

 

 

Just a funny side note, about a week after the plumber came to fix the drain pipe, our garbage disposal broke and we called him again to come fix it, we joked about just putting him on retainer. Then about a month after that we ran into him on my family's farm in Joppa, turns out he and his wife board their horse there!