Home Improvements at the Copeland's: Stage 1 - Abatement & Estimation Hell

With the advise of our insurance agent in hand, I quickly called the water abatement company to come deal with the water that was obviously still under the floor. Let me diverge for just a second here. Our agent is the best! She has continued to stay connected and has been an outstanding liaison between us and the corporate office. Way to go Sandy! Now back to the story.

The water abatement company arrived to survey the damage and immediately began ripping out the floors. The technician informed me that I was to pay my deductible directly to them, which I did, and the demo began. They pulled up the majority of the flooring and under lament in the room, exposing the sub flooring and leaving a sea of staples sticking up just high enough that you are unable to walk in the room without shoes. They put down around a half dozen huge fans in both the kitchen and basement to dry out the floors. They also put a large suction pad in the laundry to pull the water through the tile grout. Then they left us with the loud drone of fans. A couple of days later they returned, and informed us that they now needed to remove the base cabinets as the floor wasn't drying adequately and they needed to raise the temperature in the laundry room to 120 degrees to help dry out the sub floor under the tiles. If they couldn't get it dry then the new tile I had installed only a few weeks prior would need to be removed. So out came the counter top and cabinets and drying continued. A full week and a half later the abatement company gave the floors a clean bill of health. As I surveyed the damage, I took note that the abatement company had failed to remove all of the screws while pulling the counter top, completely destroying the tops of some of the base cabinets. Geez, this just keeps getting better.

Now that the floors were dry it was time to get estimates for the insurance on getting it all back together and replacing the floor. We contacted the general contractor that the insurance company recommended to come over and give an estimate, and my wife contacted the flooring company to see about getting the floors replaced. We knew that we would have trouble getting the same flooring so our assumption going in was that all the flooring would be replaced. This shouldn't be a problem as the abatement company had pulled all but about 100 square feet up anyway. The representative from the general contractor shows up, and begins walking through the kitchen and taking notes while talking out loud about what all will need to be done. I assumed he was doing that for my benefit, but now that I look back, I think it was his way of using his fingers to count. He starts talking about placing back the original cabinet bases. Of course my earlier discovery of the damage from the abatement company; the staining of the sub floor, which suspiciously looked like the early formation of mold; and the fact that on close inspection of some of the base cabinets it was clear the base of the cabinets were ruined by the water, led me to start asking questions. I asked about the need to replace or at least find a way to repair the base cabinets and if the sub floor needed to be replace. His response was that if that was needed the abatement company would have identified it as such. It was obvious this guy was both an idiot and totally devoid of the ability to see for himself. How he ever became a general contractor I will never know. In fact, I had to point out to him that he hadn't considered that he would need to reinstall the stove top, to which, he said there would likely be a lot of things he would discover as they did the work. I took that as code for "we are going to screw over the insurance company with overruns, wink wink". There was no way this guy was touching anything in my house! I asked him about the water running into the register and he indicated he would make sure a furnace specialist did an inspection, which did happen with a clean bill of health. This was great except for the fact that less than a week later the fan in the furnace went out in explosive fashion. Thank goodness we have a good friend that is a heating and air specialist who was able to drop by, order the part and fix it. Clearly this general contractor was a fraud! At this point we had no idea if our base cabinets would be repaired, reset or replaced.

My wife was faring no better. She had contacted the flooring company that the insurance recommended, and had a consultation at the house. The good thing was that the show room for the flooring store was near my wife's work in Blue Ash. The bad part was they were not focused on our best interest. Yes they has plenty of flooring options that were beautiful, but what they wanted to do was to sell us something very expensive that we didn't want under the guise of that would be what the insurance money would cover. It was obvious to both of us that this sales person was only interested in maximizing their profit. We did find a flooring that we found acceptable under the pretense that we had little choice, but it was not a selection we would make under normal circumstances. I insisted that we look at Lumber Liquidators for flooring as I believed we could get a better floor at a much cheaper cost. There was one near the flooring store so I suggested we go over there right away. We told the lady at the flooring store that we weren't interested and thanked her for her time. It is funny how suddenly the factory was running a special at 50% off and that they were going to throw in some additional discounts to get us the flooring in our house with "no money out of your pocket". We were too through with them. What a sleazy practice!

Off to Lumber Liquidators! It was amazing how quickly both my wife and I agreed on the flooring choice. We saw it almost instantly. A 5" hand scraped teak called Tobacco Road. It was perfect, and better yet, it was cheaper by almost half of what the flooring store had tried to force on us. Cheaper and better flooring for our dollar. Now we were cooking! I didn't want to have to order it from the store on the North side of Cincinnati and haul it home, but I had been unable to find the Lumber Liquidators that had opened in our neighborhood. I decided to call the local store and get directions. I believe it was the next day that we finally found the local store and visited. The salesman was very nice and funny. He gave us some samples of the flooring to take home and he arranged for a local company to come measure and give us an estimate for installation. We had decided that we would find out what it would be to install the same flooring throughout the entire main floor. The carpeting in the dining room and living rooms was shot and if we were ever considering hardwood, now was the time.

I think this is a good place to throw a different twist into the discussion. During all of this, my poor wife is left to deal with the majority of the issue as I am on site at a client in Chattanooga Tennessee and unable to assist in the coordination of all of these activities. I have to tell you, my wife is a saint! She is the most awesome life partner God could have ever chosen for me. I am in awe of her! Thanks Honey!

Now back to the drama! The flooring install company arrived at the house to measure for the Lumber Liquidators flooring install. The gentleman was quite nice and took one look at the cabinets and let my wife know that the cabinet bases were shot, and that the entire set of cabinets had to be replaced. He also informed her that he had a cabinet and flooring company and would be willing to give us an estimate on replacing the entire cabinetry as well as the flooring. He said he could give us new cabinets of better construction (full plywood construction) for less money as they had a manufacturer that built only three types of cabinets. The key was that you had to choose what they produced, no customizations were available. For us that was worth a shot to get better cabinets, so we agreed to check it out. We drove out to the cabinet shop to look at the styles that they had. We found some cabinets that we probably would not have picked ourselves, but were beautiful and would work very nicely with the flooring we chose. We also looked at granite counter tops to replace the Formica that was originally in the house. The salesman assured us that he could put in granite for the cost to simply replace the Formica. A couple of days later, my wife received the estimate.

My wife informed our claim agent that we had an issue with the cabinets, and that we had gotten and estimate. The agent indicated that they would need to send out an adjuster to confirm that in fact the cabinets needed to be replaced. An appointment was set, and the adjuster arrived and confirmed that, in fact, the cabinets did need to be replaced; however, the adjuster did not agree that the counter tops needed to be replaced, but could be reset onto the new base cabinets. We of course, disagreed and were not about to force fit an old counter top onto brand new cabinets. I contacted both the claim agent and my insurance agent to push the issue. The claim agent agreed that they would replace the counter top, but that the prices the cabinet company offered in their estimate were way too high. They were over $6,000 apart between the cabinet maker and the insurance adjuster. My wife went back and forth with the cabinet man who insisted that we could push the insurance for more, and was unwilling to budge on his price. The last straw was when he threatened my wife. He said he would contact the insurance company and tell them that we had tried to have him inflate the prices to sneak in granite. He was incensed that we would not fight for his price...after all he had gotten us new cabinets. He also said he could have easily just called the insurance company and had them issue him a check directly and then we would see. Wow, what a crook! Obviously he wasn't getting our business.

Now, what to do? We don't have a flooring installer. We don't have a general contractor. We don't have cabinets. Do we start over? We now needed to chart our next course. We decided that we were going to take matters into our own hands. We would be our own general contractor, and flooring installer, and cabinet installer. I would do all of the carpentry work myself. This wasn't a big stretch as I had done flooring, and cabinets installations before. I hadn't wanted to do it as it is time consuming and with my travel schedule I had no idea how I was going to accommodate it, but now there wasn't a choice. If this house was going to get repaired, we were going to have to do it ourselves.

Keep in mind we are now at 1 and 1/2 months without a kitchen to cook in. The bathroom has become our dish washing location, and the grill our main resource for cooking.