House molehill turns into a mountain...

The Pierce family HATES WATER! Water is creepy and elusive and invisible and destructive and it penetrates everything! Ahhhhhh! How many water issues will we endure in our home-owning lives? One evening, Chris went to start the dishwasher and when he opened our corner sink cabinet to get the soap, he saw a mess under there because the pipe that attached to our disposal had shaken loose. He was over there gagging and cleaning up for awhile. It was a little nasty, but we thought, clean up, repair it and done. Right? This was May 2nd. So by May 6th, we see out wood floors buckling and they were all dark between boards, and we knew we had a bigger issue on our hands. We called out a water restoration contractor and he discovered that we had seriously saturated half of our kitchen with water. It was saturating cabinets, sheet rock behind the cabs, floors, sub floor, it was in the crawl space...it was a huge issue. So the demo and dry out began. Seeing this I just think that my kitchen, which was fully functional and served a great purpose for seven years was sure UGLY. So. Ugly. Still, it was functional which is more than I can say for my kitchen the past five months. Yes. I am writing this in October (I'll probably file it in May)...and we still have no kitchen to claim!

You can see here how the floor boards were bowing.

Ugliest counter tops every...and they were wood wrapped.

Dryout process. You can't live through this process in your house. We moved into a hotel on May 9th.

Even though our insurance company only gave us money to replace what was damaged and not to actually have the new stuff match the existing stuff, and I was on a very tight budget, I started kitchen dreaming right away. Here are some of the screenshots I saved.

We went to stay at the Premier Plaza Best Western hotel like two miles or less from our house. We had two "king suites" which was almost comfortable for us. Betsey had her own bed because no one wanted to share a bed with anyone else. Ruby slept on a pull out bed from a couch in the living room and Alice was on a roll away. In our room, Chris and I were in the bed and Leo was in a pack and play in the oversized bathtub/shower combo. So Chris and I had to go to the other room (the rooms did not adjoin) in order to use the "facilities." That got old really fast.

We did lots of swimming. We invited i don't know, at one time we probably had like 35 guests at the pool with us. Good times.

The girls bought these mermaid tails and had some fun with them.

Mr. Chubs.

We would get stir crazy and roam the halls once breakfast was over and the hotel seemed pretty much just for us until the daily check in happened.

My slumbering babe. I love him. He is in the bathtub, that is a jet by his face.

Penny found a new (we wish it was permanent) home with a fellow Yorkie owner and was treated to many nice things.

There you can see the whole scope of Leo's bedroom. Hahahaha.

We stayed at the hotel for a sum total of 9 weeks, which would have been more but I was out of town for six of the displaced weeks and when we were gone, Chris would sleep at home. I don't even want to document the nightmare we have gone through with contractors and mishaps, so I won't.