Rub Wrongways Studios Flooded

That title sounds a little worse than it is but accurately portrays the sentiments rushing through my head this morning at 6:45 when Lesa and I discovered water streaming out of the downstairs ceiling and splashing all over everywhere.

Where was this water coming from!? I bolted back upstairs to the water heater. Nope, everything was dry there. I checked the washer and dryer...all the while the sound of water gushing into our basement studio in the background...nope, they were dry. I made a bee-line for the kitchen and discovered it was a big puddle. The sink? Nope. The dishwasher? Nope. It's all around the refrigerat...the line to the ice maker! I dove beneath the sink and turned the shut off valve and heard the water in the pipes stop flowing.

But the streaming and gushing below kept on coming.

At some point during the night, the feed to the refrigerator came disconnected and it had been spraying water for possibly hours. That water had then flowed through the floor into the ceiling of the basement, finding it's low point in the channel of the heating duct. There, it filled up like an aqua-duct until it found a small seam in the drywall and came streaming out. We grabbed as many plastic storage bins and buckets as we could find and tried to catch the worst of the flow.

Lesa brought down a pile of old towels as I quickly emptied the basement bathtub and ran around trying to make sure that nothing of value was on the floor. We sopped up what we could, tossing each towel down on the ground and watching it instantly become saturated, then hoisting it up and wringing out the cold cold water into the tub or a bucket.

Each door I opened made things more upsetting. How's the control room? "It looks dry", I said while walking in. Only when I looked back at my tracks and saw that dark footprints were absorbing up from below onto the carpet did I figure out that that room was flooded too.

I ran to the basement room to grab more buckets and found it was pretty much flooded, too. No depth to the water, a half inch at most, but it was spread everywhere. Out in the chill-out area, the ceiling was yellowing in spots and lines where water above was trying to make it's way down. Water just wants to go down. That's all it ever wants to do, and there's not much to stop it.

I quickly grabbed a hammer and awl and started poking holes in the low points of the ceiling to let the water rush out into the buckets, the carpet slushing beneath my feet. I was in socks for a good chunk of time in the frigid water. There was no time to change. Everything was urgent.

Lesa placed a call to her parents and they drove up with a wet/dry vac and it worked much better than the towel method. All the wringing out was doing a number on our hands and arms.

Eventually the streaming began to slow. We emptied out bucket after bucket into the sink and tub. Lesa called a carpet-cleaning-and-water-damage-company while I tried to move what I could out of the way. She said they would come over within a few hours.

In the meantime, we had to try and make room so that the carpets could be pulled up so that blowers could try to dry the padding below, which is like a huge sponge.

Those of you who have been to Rub Wrongways know that it is pretty full of stuff everywhere. Now, it had to all be moved within a few hours. I had to disconnect my computer and all the audio cables. We had schlepp thousands of CDS up the stairs, and move out shelves and the desk and amps and chairs and everything from the affected areas. It was a madhouse.

The good news? No instruments were harmed, no electronics were harmed, really no nothing was harmed except for some ceiling sections, some wall sections, and a few posters and boxes and some other trivial stuff.

We now have a huge blower in the basement and the carpets are pulled back to expose the padding. We'll have the blower for four days and will hopefully be able to dry everything out. The carpet company will return and put down some mildew resistant stuff and clean the carpets.

Aye aye aye, and all this before noona.

Come to the Kinks Tribute Show Tonight at The Elevens. Ten O'Clock. We'll be there and we'll be wet.