The Beginning of Our Journey

5:30am, Tel Aviv Israel, the baby starts crying.  It’s the beginning of our second to last day of our first trip to visit Erez’s family with the baby.  It’s been an amazing trip filled with family, friends, so many babies, and great weather (compared to the sub-zero temps we were avoiding at home! Score!).  I go get the baby, feed, change, play and lay her back down to try and get her to sleep one. More. Hour. PLEASE!  I then hear Erez in the kitchen, on the phone speaking in English…that means he’s talking to someone in the states.  I hear ‘water’, then ‘basement’.  I go in and mouth to him “our basement?”.  He nods yes.  At first I think “crap!” but I grew up in a house that had water in the basement from time to time. No biggy, we will get it cleaned up.  Erez gets off the phone and tells me to sit down. He says a pipe burst in our master bath.  That’s when I start putting the pieces together, the pipe burst on the second floor, but the water is in the basement….  He shows me the explosion on his phone of voicemails, texts, facebook messages about fire trucks, Ameren cars, fire alarms, neighbors, my mom going down to oversee clean up.  I discover a similar explosion on my own phone.  Erez suggests we call our neighbor Adam.

“How bad is it Adam?” “It’s bad Dana….it’s really bad…”  “6 feet of water in the basement, up to your 5th step” From the 2^nd floor.

This is where I’m going to stop with the traumatic part of the story.  Because this blog isn’t going to be about the destruction of the house from a dead furnace in the dead of winter in Savoy, Illinois.  Because ultimately, we only lost material things, things that are replaceable and rebuild-able.  This blog is about the things we learned and gained; the amazing people, both friends, family and complete strangers who went above and beyond to help us.  It is also a place I hope to share knowledge of this process from our personal experience from dealing with insurance, to the mortgage lender to contractors and design choices.  ALL while attempting to keep our minimalist values and life style in check!

I hope you will enjoy this blog.  Please share your thoughts, ideas, encouragement and questions in the comments! Thank you for joining us on our journey.