Discharged - going... well, not home

Thursday, yes the very same day that Caroline was born, we got a phone call from our neighbor that there was a small kitchen fire in a unit directly above ours on the 16th floor of our condo building. This activated the sprinkler system on the 16th floor and thankfully controlled the fire. However, the water seeped down the internal walls of the building causing water damage all the way down.

When Jonathan finally went over there that evening, the hardwood floors had begun to buckle, water was dripping from the ceiling and down the walls and there was standing water in a few places. Luckily, none of our personal belongings were wet or destroyed - really just the floors and walls. Jonathan contacted management to let them know we were in the hospital because our daughter had just been born, literally hours before and to see what the next steps were. My mom and siblings stayed at our condo Thursday night and handled the claims adjuster that came in after 1 AM.

Long story short - Jonathan ended up having to spend the better part of Friday and Saturday at the condo cleaning things up, moving things around, taking pictures off the walls, etc to prepare our condo for demolition. Funny thing is that we spent the last several months preparing the condo and "nurse-wall" for Caroline's arrival and it was all undone in a matter of hours.

The claims adjuster determined they would need to rip out half of our floor and some of our walls. Then we have to wait for 10 days to let everything dry out before they even talk about putting it back together again. We might be looking at 30+ days to complete.

Needless to say, we couldn't take a newborn baby home to this kind of a mess. There were very loud fans all over the place, dust from the sheet rock being cut out and workers coming in and out as they please. Not ideal conditions for a newborn or a new mom!

Seeing as how we were being discharged from the hospital on Saturday, we had to figure out where we were going to go. Best option seemed to be to go to Jonathan's parent's house in Griffin. So we loaded up all of Caroline's things (didn't want to leave any chance for them to get dusty in the condo) and a few necessities for us. I didn't even get to go to the condo at all - left straight from the hospital and drove to Griffin. Good thing was, my mom and siblings were also able to come stay at the Bohn's house too.

Now that the demo crew has completed their initial assessment, we've found out that they'll have to replace our entire floor since they won't be able to match up the wood. We still don't have any better estimates of when we'll be able to get back in there or when they'll be finished putting it all back together. Here's hoping it's sooner rather than later!