My house has been flooded - Advice?

rIcK · Thursday at 23:51

We have been planning on renovating for many months, had planning permission to extend and the plan was to completely gut it etc. The house was fairly bare so we didn't have many rooms with carpets.

I've been doing up a few rooms over the past few months to make it a bit more liveable because we have been living in complete squalor the last few years. Got myself a decent fridge, washing machine etc for the next 6 months before we started renovation so we can live a little better. Then this happened

This whole event has obviously scuppered plans so now I'm questioning if we even spend the money renovating and or making the building flood proof.

We saved a lot of items due to putting them on counter tops etc.

I went back today and removed my expensive NAS / amplifier, speakers and subwoofer and moved it into self storage. Threw away all my food from the fridge. Power was still out.

Here are a few pics of my little bits of improvement in our gross little house over the past few months. I now have no clue what to do... It doesn't really feel worth fixing it up to then potentially gut it anyway during our extension / renovation in about 6 months time. Feels like it would be nice to get some form of payout and start rippling out walls, but I doubt that's an option

rIcK · Friday at 00:11

Here is a quick walk round the next day (this afternoon) after all the water has receeded. You can see the dirty marks where the water has come up a few inches in my bedroom and in the bathroom the worst. (Back of the house)

The living room and spare junk room with my bikes don't seem to be as bad, but you can see the damp residue everywhere.

dlockers · Friday at 00:16

rIcK said:
Here is a quick walk round the next day (this afternoon) after all the water has receeded. You can see the dirty marks where the water has come up a few inches in my bedroom and in the bathroom the worst. (Back of the house)

The living room and spare junk room with my bikes don't seem to be as bad, but you can see the damp residue everywhere.

Two brompton bikes - you can afford it (y)

rIcK · Friday at 00:21

dlockers said:
Two brompton bikes - you can afford it (y)

Good job we had our Bromptons! Otherwise getting away / back would have been a nightmare given my car was trapped behind over a meter of water!

Rroff · Friday at 00:24

rIcK said:
We saved a lot of items due to putting them on counter tops etc.

Something I decided to do after we had a close call with flooding at my old house was to store expensive stuff in wall mounted cabinets where possible, we got lucky some people in the area not so much.

Best of luck getting it all sorted.

unwashed potato! · Friday at 00:25

will all house insurance deal with this? i ask as i thought you had to have insurance that specifically included flood damage, which most wont, and will cost a chunk extra to include, to have them cover situations like this.

i like right near a small river that flooded about 20 years ago. council since did a load of work and installed a large flood barrier, however insurance companies don't care about this installation. out latest provider didn't include flood damage, so curious would i still be covered if something simliar happened to me as what the op has?

rIcK · Friday at 00:27

unwashed potato! said:
will all house insurance deal with this? i ask as i thought you had to have insurance that specifically included flood damage, which most wont, and will cost a chunk extra to include, to have them cover situations like this.

i like right near a small river that flooded about 20 years ago. council since did a load of work and installed a large flood barrier, however insurance companies don't care about this installation. out latest provider didn't include flood damage, so curious would i still be covered if something simliar happened to me as what the op has?

My buildings insurance is combined with some flats on my estate. That covers flood damage.

My contents does too.

It's never flooded before and officially had a 0.1% chance of flooding. I guess we got that 0.1%

It wasn't even raised when I bought it, only found out later on.

Resident · Friday at 10:49

Blackjack Davy said:
Most of properties in the news flooded recently appear to be new builds I noticed - in the US its different and parts of places like New Orleans are basically uninsurable due to flood risk and are at risk of getting depopulated

I live near Catcliffe in Rotherham.

About 40 years ago they built a new estate and then added more about 5-7 years later, on land that was about level with the normal level of the nearby river & nearby lake.

At the time there was a massive, man made mountain of all the waste materials from the mine. During heavy rains, that mountain soaked up a lot which prevented the estate from flooding.

In the late 80s, the mountain was removed and an open cast mine opened, which removed almost double the amount of ground soak. In 1990 the estate flooded for the first time.

The mine has now been filled in however a new estate was built on top (about 10 years ago) and since then the low estate has flooded several times.

413x · Friday at 11:08

Have to wonder how much house insurance will be in general going forward. More and more we hear about places never flooding, now flooding.

Sorry to hear op. Especially in a bungalow. Not like you can just move stuff up stairs.

How much does a flood knock off the value of a home?