cimorene

Our [first] basement flood was in August and when that happened, a newly-installed, freshly-pressure-tested plastic joint between two pipes burst as soon as the pressure testing machine was removed, shooting full city water pressure out of a ceiling-adjacent pipe in the basement for a couple of hours and filling the finished side of the basement with about 10 inches of water - a hallway, sauna and adjacent shower, storage, and the utility room where our water heater stands, and confined there by a foot-high cement threshold between the garage and the finished basement which prevented the water from simply rushing straight out and down the driveway to the street so that the two floor drains (utility room and shower room) in the finished basement quickly stopped up and failed to keep up with the draining because of the badly-designed plumbing and ancient septic tank under the garage.

So, the drains didn't drain fast enough to prevent the water from rising very quickly. That evening we carried all the furniture out while the five (?) plumbers and contractors were wading around risking electrocution and trying to turn off things (water, electricity...) and get the water to start draining out. Which means that in the utility room, our hot water heater - a state-of-the-art beautiful geothermal energy pump installed in 2011 by the previous owner when she was planning for this to be her forever home - was sitting immersed to its nonexistent kneecaps, saturating its wiring and I guess its motherboard or whatever. It became completely dead and would not turn on at all.

(This led to a week or two of running back and forth because Wax and her mom didn't think that following the info from the back of the user manual to find a brand service technician would be as good as having our personal electrician try it out and then call a couple of his buddies, eventually leading to the nearest qualified technician anyway, but not until we had been without hot water for a week or whatever. And then we ended up being without hot water for something like six weeks before they eventually put a temporary water heater in because right when our replacement one had been ordered from abroad, our master plumber's wife had a life-threatening health emergency and went into the hospital, and he was unavailable to his colleagues even by phone for a couple of weeks.)

So the water was pumped out, the septic tank was drained, some industrial fans were brought in to blow on and dry things out, the piping was replaced, a pipe snake truck was brought in which blasted through some blockages, a camera snake guy came out to photograph the piping and find out what was wrong, a temporary water heater and then eventually a replacement water heater were installed, and all the billing was completely deferred while the issue went to insurance. (Wax and her bro guessed last night that all of this might be around 30k, which is more than our currently outstanding contractors' bills but less than all the loans on this house.)

Ah!, you say. Insurance! Yes.

Our homeowner's insurance and our plumber's professional insurance got to duke it out. His insurance had it first - for what seemed like months - before they recently suddenly informed him they considered it wasn't his fault because his pipe failing should not have flooded the basement had all the floor drains been working correctly (potentially true though possibly debatable given the threshold and the water pressure, but these drains would have been fixed before the plumbers finished our house... they just... had not actually gotten to that part of the task yet, which in retrospect was a gamble all of us wish we hadn't taken...). So they sent this to our insurance, and after some back-and-forth because it was in MIL's name and the estate still isn't settled, they recently informed us that they don't intend to pay either because in their view it was entirely the plumber's fault.

So... anyone who knows how Finnish insurance works is welcome to tell us what we're supposed to do next... even if it's 'talk to a debt management advisor', I guess, which obviously is on our to-do list at some point.

Why did we ever decide we wanted a house?! It was a terrible idea. And everybody who has any sort of loans, go immediately and buy life insurance, please. Yes, you.