How to survive a flood in an apartment and eliminate the consequences

Six months after acceptance, there was a flood in my apartment in a new building. And these were not neighbors.

At the level of my apartment, the expansion joint pipe burst (see. Photo)!

At first there was only a fistula, but after the plumber's wrong actions, it completely burst. The whole apartment (36.9 m2) was flooded with hot water, about ankle-deep. During the flood, there was no time to take pictures, but they shot a video: some of the photos are screenshots from this video.

By the way, the apartment was with a fine finish from the developer and at that time it was still under warranty - I was lucky. This meant that the finishing would be restored to me at the expense of the Management Company.

First the laminate swelled, then the doors. The furniture damaged the dining table, hallway and bed (see. Photo).

While the developer was looking for someone to blame, I demanded that the laminate be dismantled as soon as possible. I did not undertake to shoot on my own, so that later the management company would not refuse to eliminate the consequences of the flood.

The laminate was removed after about a week. Not surprisingly, mold has gone up the walls. However, it only appeared on indoor plasterboard partitions. The walls are monolithic along the contour of the apartment, and there was no mold. We dried the concrete floors with heat guns for about a week and a half. Much attention was paid to the temperature and humidity conditions in the apartment: the air had to be hot enough to dry the floor, but it should not be humid - mold loves a humid environment.

During drying, they stripped off the wallpaper themselves to speed up the repair. Then representatives of the Criminal Code polished the walls, removed traces of mold, and treated the walls with mortar. The walls dried out for several more days, and no more mold appeared.

The time has come to lay the laminate, and I decided to hurry up - in the kitchen-living room, instead of the laminate, put a more appropriate tile there instead of the laminate. The work was carried out by the same master from the UK, materials and work came out for 9,000 rubles. To join the tile and laminate in the kitchen-living room, a fungus threshold was used (see. Photo). It worked out well.

In parallel, the masters of the UK did the grouting of the walls and glued the wallpaper, changed the doors. Eliminated the consequences of the flood for about 2.5 months.

This was my first and hopefully the last flood. I want to give some advice to those who were affected for the first time as well as me:

1. If you are leaving for a long time, shut off the water. It is even better to play it safe thoroughly: install a "smart home" and insure the apartment against floods, fires, etc.

2. If a flood finds you at home, try not to fuss with rags and buckets, but think about how you can avoid water leaks into the apartment - maybe you can pick up the hose from the washing machine and lower it into the bath

3. If, nevertheless, the water "got out" outside the bathroom, try to close the doors to other rooms and tightly plug the gap between the door and the floor with rags

If you are wondering how the situation was resolved from a legal point of view, I will write about it in the next article.

Have you encountered a flood? What measures did you take?

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