It has been a long road to recovering from the catastrophic plumbing leak that occurred two months ago due to our plumbers over-tightening a plastic fitting.

For starters, the leak itself turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg when it came to our plumbing issues.  We had another plumber come and inspect the visible plumbing work, and he discovered around 20 issues that needed to be addressed, and eventually all of them were corrected.

The first step in the remediation work was to remove the drywall from the affected areas.  The next step was to dry everything out. That caused another set of problems, such as over drying in our bead board ceilings.

Once the moisture was removed, and the fans were gone, we could get on with the reconstruction work.  Now, the affected areas have been drywalled and plastered, and the door casing has been put back on.  It looks pretty good.  Here are some before and after shots.

And here is a good shot of our rec room now.

Next week, the painters start painting. Then we just have to put the lighting and hardware back together, and we are back in business in the basement.

We will unfortunately loose our kitchen and family room for a week when the painters will be fixing the cracks in the bead board.

A parting thought about our water leak vs what could have been.  Yesterday a friend came over that also experience a water leak from their kitchen island.  In their case, the leak was very slow and happened over a very long time.  the water got into their floor and spread all over the house between the flooring and the slab.  They discovered this just as they had the house on the market and had 3 interested parties.  The fallout from the leak was devastating – almost the entire house had to be pulled apart – walls, floors … everything, because the water had caused extensive mold under the floors and in the walls.

So in our case I do feel little lucky; the leak was discovered very quickly, and while the damage was extensive, we were able to remediate it before mold had a chance to grow, and we will be back in business fairly soon.  The road for our friends will be a much longer one.