Our kitchen - A. Part series. Part 1

At Christmas Paul and I noticed the floor boards in front of the kitchen sink had suddenly warped. It seemed almost overnight!! It was so bad that you could cut your foot on the sharp edges and corners sticking up if you weren't careful. We covered the boards with a rug to keep our feet safe. After the holidays were over we began taking down Christmas stuff. Paul went into the crawl space to put the tree away and that's when he saw it. The crawl space against the back wall of the house had flooded. Water was pouring down the side of the wall as I washed dishes upstairs in the kitchen. Several boxes of stuff were soaked and completely ruined. Fortunately those boxes only contained junk that we needed to get rid of anyway. Mold had begun to grow in them, on the banana chair, and who knows what else. We got the mess all cleaned up and the next day we called the insurance company. They told us to immediately find a plumber and get the leak fixed. We called Daniel Angus of Campbell plumbing after receiving recommendations from others about him. He came in and pulled out all the insulation in that area of the crawl space to reveal EXTENSIVE damage to the subfloor and floor joists. This was worse than we thought. The insurance adjuster came out next. He was very thorough in his inspection and determined that we would basically need a new kitchen. The subfloor and part of the floor joist would need to be replaced. That meant ripping everything out down to the bones. Due to the way the cabinets were installed there would be no way to get them out without ruining them. So we would need new of those as well. And you can't replace a few lower cabinets only - the rest of the kitchen wouldn't match. So it ALL needed to be replaced. HOLY COW. I was absolutely floored. He sent his report off to the insurance company and we prepared to have our lives turned upside down...