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Boy, you got off easy!
My neighbor waited his entire life to go on a big trip through Asia and Europe. He was gone from June to August.
Some time in June a pipe in his wall burst that fed his washing machine hot water. His washing machine and dryer were inside the house, not the garage. Because he is a bug and pest nazi he put really good rubber seals on his door to the garage from the laundry room. The door to the rest of the house had a gap of about 1 inch and the floors were a mixture of wood and tile in common areas and carpet in the bedrooms.
That water ran for weeks! Destroyed the laundry room. Destroyed the first few inches of every other room and the carpet in the bedrooms. Furniture. Beds with comforters hanging to the floor level. Couches. Chairs. Tables. Nightstands. Everything in everything.
He finally figured it out when he got his water bill and it was hundreds more than he expected. Asked if another neighbor could check things out and he was like, dude! Your house is like a fish aquarium!
His daughter came in from a few hours away and opened up the house. We shutoff the water and begin draining it and throwing shit into a massive trash bin for him while he tried to forget about it as best he could and continue his trip.
After that episode all of the neighbors decided it was smart to give each other keys and have each other actually go into our houses to make sure all is good while we are away.
He did have insurance that covered broken pipes so he got a lot of money back. But what I thought was really odd and crazy is that when it came to certain things the insurance company would say, well, your washer was 5 years old. So we won't give you $540 for a new one since you already got a lot of use out of it. Here is $280 instead. They did that with a lot of things. But floors, walls, carpet, etc he got all of that redone.
Since then we actually had a hose burst in our garage while on the second day of a three week vacation. One of my neighbors came in to get a beer from my garage. I usually have a fridge full of them. It seemed like it happened an hour or two before he got there so not a lot of pooled water and no damage. People used to ask me, isn't it weird that your neighbors just let themselves into your garage and grab beers from your fridge? Naw! Cheapest beers I've ever given away!
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