I need some help deciding how to proceed with demo and repair after a kitchen water leak during a pandemic.
Last Thursday, my kitchen faucet failed while running my portable dishwasher. I happened to be outside at the time, so I didn't notice for a maximum of 20 minutes, during which time water was pouring onto my countertop, to the kitchen floor, and into the basement of my 98 year-old house. I mopped up all the standing water in the kitchen with 6 or 7 bath towels and got everything that was wet out of the basement before the disaster-recovery people got here about an hour later. They vacuumed the basement carpet (very low-pile) and put huge dehumidifiers in the basement and kitchen, which are still running. They told me after looking at the walls and edges of the floor with a thermal imaging camera that because water had actually seeped in to the edges of the vinyl-tiled kitchen floor and walls that they have to demo the outer floor tiles and the bottom 2 feet of drywall, which will necessitate removing the cabinets, to prevent future mold. But our dilemma is that our kitchen hasn't been updated since probably the '80s and we hate it, and are planning on a total remodel next year if Covid allows it. Honestly, we'd just try to make it happen now if there was someplace we could stay while the work is being done, but we don't Air BnB and aren't feeling like hotels are safe enough. So my questions are, having caught the problem within 20 minutes and gotten all the standing water up quickly and dehumidifiers running within 2 hours, do we really need to demo it right away? And if so, can we just have them hang the cabinets back up without fixing the edge of the floor or the drywall until we remodel? And how would that work wrt the insurance claim? Or would it make more sense to figure out a way to do a full remodel during the pandemic? We haven't even begun to figure out what we want in there so, we'd be starting from scratch. |
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