The Flood

At the beginning if February we were quite in for a shock.

Seeing that our flat is located on the first floor, the last thing you would expect to happen here is a flood, right?

Yeah, that's what we thought and when the lady from the charity shop underneath our flat knocked and asked if we had a leak we were totally puzzled. There we no signs of leakage in our flat so we went downstairs to look at the damage to ascertain what the problem may be.

One of the deck panels was so soaked that it gave way in the middle and created a  hole through which water happily dripped down onto the shop floor. We noticed that the area was underneath our bathroom and we started panicking - after all it was the coldest weekend so far and we thought of burst water pipes underneath our floorboards.....oh joy!

So the next thing was to check in our bathroom and we figured that it must have come for our toilet as for some reason when we flushed it, a small trickle of water was coming out of nowhere, slowly dropping to the floor. But that did not help us find the pipe which must have been the cause of all the drama.

After quite an exhaustive telephone search we found a plumber to come and see us and while we were waiting for him we discovered what caused the leak in the shop below.

The only storage space we have in our flat is a small section below the water tank and as the plumber later found out our ball valve was not doing its job properly, causing the overflow (the white piece of plastic you can see in the middle section of the pipe) to do just that - over flowing with water. 

The whole area of our stored stuff was flooded, boxes and bags soaked and the worst thing was that my emergency laptop was right in the thick of it.

We had to dry all the stuff out for over a week before we could start trying to see if all was still in working order. One of our main worries was the huge Scalextric set of Mr P's - as the cars and tracks have been collected over many years there would have been no way we would have been able to replace it. Apart from one car everything was in fine working order.

As for my laptop, that was truly dead - other than having water dripping from it and the hissing noises it made when I tried to connect it, there was no life left.

Thankfully I have the best home contents insurance ever - with Lloyds TSB. I called them and explained which items were affected, I got the replacement value for the Scalextric card in cash and a voucher to buy myself a new laptop. How cool!

The only thing that wasn't covered was the charge for the plumber, but I am cool with that.

In a weird way we are actually glad that this flooding happened because we now have gotten hold of fab plumber who is also an electrician and will be able to fix our power shower and we finally cleaned out our storage area with all those bits we collected over the years that we have no use for anymore.