Skip to main content

Water: Expectations

I'm almost certain, that if I had a therapist, I'd be told that I should talk about how I feel.

I'm upset.

I'm frustrated.

I'm stressed.

I went downstairs to the basement last night, innocently enough.   I was looking for some rain pants.

I wasn't expecting the splash.  Who expects that?   Who expects to put their foot down on the carpet and have it splash.

I wasn't expecting to see the signs of water seepage along the edges of the hardwood floor in the basement either.  Or the bubbles in the paint under the basement window.

I was expecting to find rain pants, run back up stairs, put them in the truck and head out to pickup a trailer of canoes.

I didn't expect the friendly conversation with the nice young lady that answered the phone when I called the insurance company.

I didn't expect to talk to an insurance adjuster.  (Although, he was amazingly helpful, and did a great job of walking us through the process.)   The lady from the restoration place was great too.

What it basically comes down to is that we had water enter through or around the basement window.  From all purposes, it looks as if we have no insurance coverage.  It wasn't sewer backup, it wasn't a pipe burst, it was water seepage.

We haven't heard back from the insurance agency.  Probably not until later in the week.

We did start damage control this morning.   We cut away the wet drywall, ripped up the hardwood floor (sob), and tore out the wet insulation.

At this point, I'm asking Mother Nature to go easy on us.  I have 2 exterior basement walls without insulation.  Please don't let the temperature drop too much.

While tearing out the drywall around the electrical panel, we realized we could see daylight.  Not the best thing to see from inside the basement.   We also discovered that there is no insulation around the 'headers'.   The headers are the pockets above your exterior walls made by your floor joists.

Usually, you'd want those insulated.  It tends to keep the house warmer, especially the floors.

So, in order to fix that, you need access to them.  So, we tore out the drywalled, stippled ceiling too.

We also found about 50 or so advertising flyers for Kanata Self Storage.  They were stuffed in the headers, as if they were for insulation.  Oh, and a report card from the spring semester from Sir Robert Borden High School dated 1985.  Two years after the house was built.

I've got another 150 square feet of hardwood to pull up, but it's going to wait until the morning.

Then we need to figure out the best method to fix everything.  Funny how something like this isn't built into our monthly budget.  We just don't have a line item for 'flood repair' or the like.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Policies and Controls are King in the IT Security world

I came across an article by Roger Grimes over at Infoworld on how security policies and controls are the real power when it comes to IT security. Roger mentions the SANS 20 Critical Security Controls for Effective Cyber Defence , which are a great read for anyone looking at updating or auditing your policies for completeness. The SANS top 20 controls are a must for any organization: Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Devices Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Software Secure Configurations for Hardware and Software on Laptops, Workstations, and Servers Secure Configurations for Network Devices such as Firewalls, Routers, and Switches Boundary Defense Maintenance, Monitoring, and Analysis of Security Audit Logs Application Software Security Controlled Use of Administrative Privileges Controlled Access Based on the Need to Know Continuous Vulnerability Assessment and Remediation Account Monitoring and Control Malware Defenses Limitation and Control

Error 217 - Error creating product object on Domino 64 bit

I'd like to share something with you.   An error that you'll get if you are trying to use ODBC with Domino 8.5.1 64bit. It starts out with an agent error of Error 217.  The text of the error is "Error creating product object" You can read about it here on the Notes/Domino forum . You can find the solution here as well . I guess I'm now waiting for Domino 8.5.2 for a solution for this.   It would have been nice to have had this in the release notes.  It would have help me greatly.

Reminder: Increase the maximum available memory on your Lotus Notes client JVM today!

Yup, that's right.  Public Service Announcement time. If you haven't increased the maximum memory available to your Lotus Notes JVM yet, what are you waiting for? By default, the Notes JVM only has 256mb of memory available to it.  On a system with 4GB+ of memory, you should be easily able to increase it to 1/4 to 1/3 of the system memory and improve the end user performance. Here's how: Shut down Lotus Notes. In order to make sure that all processes are stopped, run this command:  Start -> Run Type: C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\Lotus\Notes\nsd.exe -kill Open: C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp\deploy\ Open the "jvm.properties" file in a text editor like notepad.  You will possibly require Administrator permissions. At the beginning of the file, you will see text surrounded by a lot of pound signs ####. The first ‘property’ after the last # sign is: vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx256m Change 256m to 1024m so that the line reads: vmarg.X