Our Christmas Miracle

Early Friday morning (4 AM to be exact!) we awoke to the piercing sound of our Fire Alarm!  As I began to gather the children, Brian tried to find the source of the smoke or fire.  No luck!  We couldn't smell any smoke and we didn't find a fire...??  Brian thought perhaps our detectors were going haywire and began to disable the alarms.  We still were nervous that there was some problem and thought perhaps the source was in the computer room, which holds most our electrical stuff.  While investigating Brian noticed a drop of water coming out of the smoke detector in the office...all of the sudden it hit us!!  The upstairs bathroom is directly above the office and water must have leaked through the detector from the bathroom causing the wires to get wet and setting off the alarm!!!  AHHH!  Sure enough...upstairs toilet was plugged and the water was running!  Almost a half inch of water was all throughout the bathroom and the carpet in the hallway and partly in Megan's room.

Miracle you say?  YES!  We think one of the children had gone to the bathroom just a short time before the alarm went off, and plugged the toilet without realizing.  And the water only came through the floor (ceiling downstairs) about 1 foot in diameter, and it happened to be right where the fire alarm was, which caused the wires to get wet, which caused the alarm to go off, and alert us to the problem!  No one was due to wake for another 2 HOURS, so the toilet would have continued to run and caused a MUCH bigger, nastier problem than we currently have!  We feel very blessed!

Here's the damage:

It shouldn't cost too much to fix...we are drying out the carpet and plan on having it re-installed in a couple days (or maybe after Christmas...we aren't in any hurry), and we might have to replace the flooring in the bathroom...not sure yet.  We did have someone come to our home to access the damage to make sure we were doing it all correctly and not missing any water damage, and that did cost a bit.  Having the carpet re-installed will be an expense, but other than that we shouldn't have to do too much! :)