I’d just got my house sorted and nice, and got my newly independent life on track, and the floods came.
I had no idea I would be flooded – stupid looking back, but I looked out of the window at 11 pm and the rain had stopped, nothing to see. I didn’t look out at the side of the house where the cycle path runs along, otherwise I’d have started panicking. Went to bed, thinking I’ll be fine.
3.45am- the doorbell’s ringing and I’m thinking it’s my son’s friends messing about. I went to put the light on and the electric’s off. My daughter meanwhile, had gone downstairs and there’s this voice shouting ‘Does your mum know she’s flooded?’
I came downstairs, and walking along the hallway was like walking on wooden waves. The water had come up under the laminate flooring which was rippling and breaking up as I walked on it. I’m laughing now, but at the time…
I started to pick things up off the floor, like my handbag, which was totally full of water and I thought ‘What’s the point?’ so left it all there, got a glass of wine and sat on the window ledge. I just sat there for half an hour in total disbelief. I never in a million years thought this would happen. Then I went to bed.
There were fire engines and rescue services going through the street all night, and every time one went by, the waves got the floods going again. There were ambulances and boats ferrying people all night.
7am I woke up thinking what am I going to do? I asked the firemen if they’d help me get our pet snake and lizard upstairs – they both live in big heavy glass cases – but they wouldn’t help me. My rabbit was floating in it’s hutch in the garden - they said it was better off left there, but I paddled out and rescued it. Then I abandoned my house. You want to stay with your home, but you can’t look at it or deal with it, so I got away.
The streets were mayhem – queues of people waiting for transport – fire engines blocking the street – people just gathering on street corners not knowing what to do, people walking round shellshocked.
I dropped my kids and dog off at a friend’s house and with the rabbit in a cardboard box in a plastic carrier bag, walked down Priory Road to Cottingham to drop it off with another friend.
I felt that I should go back to the house, but I got in through the door and just stood there and cried. A friend came round and managed to get permission to get my electric on upstairs for the animals.
I spent the night at a friend’s house, but I couldn’t settle. At 2am I left him a note and went back to my house and cried ‘til 6am. Unless you’ve been through it yourself, you can’t explain how you feel.
I was instructed by the insurance company to leave everything until the loss adjusters and cleaners came, which wasn’t for two weeks.
The Loss Adjuster finally came – looked everywhere, took photos. Then Rainow came and started stripping everything out. The bloody snake got out, and the loss adjuster was terrified – these big fellas sat on the manky sofa with their feet in the air, and I’m running round trying to find him. He’s only a corn snake but they acted like he was a huge python. Turned up in a cupboard in the kitchen.
It was the most horrible feeling watching all your possessions get thrown on the skip. They chucked my furniture out and left, saying they’d be back later to take the floors up.
I couldn’t stand it any longer, so me and my son (who is asthmatic and has a collapsed lung) stood there on the mangy floor. The insurance company rang to ask if I was getting my own builders. I’m a single parent, I work nights, where do I find time to find my own builders and project manage? No way Icould do it on my own.
She told me to just get on with it, and I completely flipped. ‘Don’t you dare tell me to do it myself!’ I was screaming down the phone at her. Eventually she said to me ‘Calm down and I’ll ring you back.’ I must have been screaming loud – I’m not normally like that at all, but the pressure gets to you.
I rang her back and apologised – she was laughing and said that all her collegues could hear me on the phone. She sent me some builders – they came a week later – stripped walls, door frames, everything. By this time I was back in the house, in a sort of makeshift flat upstairs.
This is where the nightmare begins.
These builders took the downstairs toilet out and the handbasin. There’s a false bit of wall where the waste pipes go and this was behind the handbasin – they didn’t cap the hole in the pipe after they’d taken the handbasin out.
We kept getting water flooding into the house – the garage kept getting flooded and all the downstairs – not like before, but definitely puddles. I kept calling the builders and telling them that the water was coming in from somewhere. It took them three weeks to get back to me. They came down and told me it was my fault for having the humidifier pipe running out of the letterbox – the water was ‘obviously’ seeping in under the concrete and back up into the living room.
I may be stupid, but humidifiers dribble, not gush. But in their eyes I was a neurotic woman.
They hadn’t taken the plaster off the wall that hid the stench pipe – this fella had been round and said ‘We don’t want to take the pipe out, because we don’t want to disturb the coving on the ceiling.’ House like a bombsite and they were worried about the coving.
One particular night we’d all had baths, me and the kids, and the flooding was worse than usual. It dawned on me where the flood was coming from – they hadn’t plugged the pipe when they’d taken the downstairs sink out. It was seeping out from behind that wall – bath water, toilet water, everything.
I felt that they treated my differently because I was a ‘Miss’ and on my own with the kids. Almost as though they could get away with sloppiness.
One of the builders said to me ‘We was warned about you – the insurance company had said you were highly strung.’ How dare they. The patronising builders kept saying ‘Chill out, lady.’ Now I know why. I could have knocked his block off.
I didn’t hear anything more from the builders ‘till November. In the meantime I’d got a letter from the loss adjusters telling me I’d been postcoded and allocated a new builder. This new builder came, resurveyed the house and found a lot more needed doing than the original survey found. The original builder had put all the fixtures and fittings in the garage and was going to fit them all back in again. The new guy said ‘We don’t put anything back – it’s all new toilets, sinks and anything else.
He went away and I heard nothing. Then out of the blue the first builder came back ‘We’re starting on your house, now.’
‘No you’re not’, I told him, ‘I’ve been allocated new builders.’ Nobody had told him.
I got my start date 17th December I was in heaven. I rang the week before to check, and they hadn’t got the relevant paperwork – no survey report, no all-clear from the loss adjuster, or a signed mandate from me, which I had signed and sent to them ages ago.
Meanwhile we were living in a caravan in the garden. The insurance company at first tried to give me a massive caravan that would have filled the whole drive, they’d have had to knock down fences, and the builders would never have been able to get in and out. I rejected that offer, then they offered me a little tourer caravan for the three of us to live in, not enough room to swing a cat. I was getting sick of living off takeaways, so I rented a caravan myself.
17th December came, and the builders didn’t. I rang them all up – builders, loss adjusters, insurance company and everyone blamed someone else. The woman from the insurance company told me I was being silly for getting so upset, and I threatened to report her for slandering me to the builders, about my ‘highly strung outburst’ and refused to deal with her. ‘I rang you back and apologised, and we’d laughed about it, then you say that to him about me’.
The insurance people gave me someone else to deal with, who was lovely, but she went on sick and I was passed from pillar to post through lots of arguments about starting dates.
February – they were still full of false promises and crap – I was going to end up with this fabulous house, they told me.
First they took out the dividing walls and dumped everything in the lounge. A fella came at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon and informs me that they were going to start a full rewire 8am the next day. I had to get as much as I could out of the upstairs and into the caravan. And I had to do it on my own.
The house over the road – same style house, same insurers, same water damage – they were put up in Willerby Manor Hotel, and their stuff put in storage and were given a caravan. No kids. In and done in 4 months.
I had to sort everything myself. They did the rewire, tramping roughshod over everything I left upstairs and totally destroyed it. At times it felt as though my home had been raped.
Then the electricians burst a gas pipe. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. I couldn’t smell the gas, but the project manager popped in to see how it was going and says ‘I can smell gas – I’ll get it looked into.’
This was on the Friday – Tuesday, a man came to sort some estimates for a burglar alarm and says ‘You’ve got a gas leak – get them rang up now, or your house won’t be here.’ It was only the fact that there was all the ventilation with people in and out of the house and there was no electricity on at the time – one light switch spark could have blown us all to kingdom come. The project manager had smelt the gas on Friday and it took a phonecall on Tuesday to get him to sort it out.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried with frustration. I’ve got two kids and they were both doing their gcse and a levels that summer.
The project manager wasn’t going to do anything with the upstairs. He told me: ‘What I’ll do for you, just because it’s you, I can knock a bit off, but it won’t be cheap - I’ll get your upstairs sorted, when we’ve finished downstairs. A little deal between you and me.’
The insurance company had already agreed that they would pay him to do upstairs, but he was trying it on. On the fiddle he was, tried it with several houses, and ended up getting the sack.
The next project manager came and they started putting the dividing walls in. I’d come back from work one morning and laid on the bed – nobody knew I was in. The whole house started to shake. I could hear this builder banging and arguing, shouting his mouth off, being really nasty to his labourer.
I went downstairs and it was as though he had no respect at all for my house. He smoked all the time and burnt my windowsills with his cigarettes. And the workmanship – I’ve never seen anything so shoddy. I was in tears, it was so unbelievable. He was patching bits everywhere. I got the builder, surveyer and project manager to come down. I had the three of them in front of me and I stood on a pile of plasterboard so I could look down on them and give me a bit more confidence – I wasn’t going to let them intimidate me again and fob me off with excuses, and they agreed that the walls were sloppy. They decided to take it all out and start again. The wall man came back – he told me: ‘ I don’t like being told that my work is crap.’ He then pointed a finger at me and said ‘You will sign off for every bit of work I do before I carry on to the next bit.’ I couldn’t believe it.
One morning I came home from work to go upstairs and heard dripping. As I came downstairs I noticed that the wood on the wall was wet. It was a seal on the boiler that had got a leak with all the vibrations from the wall man’s hammering. They put some rags round it to seal it.
The hot water started playing up, so the electrician came and discovered that the original electricians had messed it up, and they had to rebodge the heating and the boiler systems.
The walls started getting put back in and I came home one day and - Oh My God! There was water showering in through the lounge, streaming downstairs and a burst pipe in the kitchen.
The little drip in the boiler that they’d put the rag round had burst and flooded the house.
Oh fuck I’ve had enough. Tears again.
A new loss adjuster came round – the head man. I was in a state – I wanted to jump off the bridge, but only the thought of my kids stopped me. I wanted to walk away – let them reposess. But it’s my children’s future, their inheritance.
This was April. The loss adjuster was fantastic – ‘I’ll get this sorted – these things shouldn’t be happening’. I showed him the damage from the builders and he was shocked at the workmanship – upstairs the plaster was starting to crack from the hammering bad tempered guy.
He ordered new carpets upstairs, replastering and a full decoration of the whole house. The builders had knackered the whole house.
The banging builders came down on Good Friday determined to work Easter weekend, carrying on in their same shoddy way, and I just threw them out.
The boss came and I told him that I didn’t want that man in my house again. The boss organised a meeting to get the situation sorted – none of them turned up for it. Just me, sat there.
I rang the Loss Adjuster, who told me to get my own builders – there were some who were advertising on Viking FM aimed specifically at cases such as mine – I wasn’t the only one who’d been put through this. They came and all the work was condemned – had to be taken out. I was devastated. It was May and we were back to square one.
Their surveyer videoed the damage and said no way would those other builders get paid.
They would have to strip it all out to begin again, but by this time, three sets of builders on, they had no idea what my house looked like originally.
The last builders wanted to do a survey, to see if they could salvage any work to be paid for. They arranged to be there at 8.30am. I rang the new builders up, and asked them to be there too, as I’d had enough of arguing with the old builders. The old builders came at 8.15, and I asked them to wait for the other men. They just drove off. They wouldn’t resurvey for two weeks, which meant that no work could be done until they’d had their work seen.
Two more weeks! I got the Loss Adjuster on the phone to the old builders and he told them that they would be paying for the caravan and expenses until their survey was done. They were round at 5pm that same day.
The next morning the new builders blitzed the house and found several dangerous rewirings.
The stress of it all was taking its toll. I was trying to work, bring my kids up who were going through their exams, I couldn’t sleep for the noise and I had to put my dad in a home. I was so stressed that people couldn’t speak to me at work because I would just argue with them – I was on the defensive all the time, and taking it all out on the wrong people. I was in deep shit at work and had been reported several times for ‘bad attitude’, but with no support, I’d had enough.
Luckily the new builders were fantastic – they turned up when they said they were going to, they put in a new central heating system, everything got replaced, but the problems started when they started rushing things.
One day I had 2 labourers, 2 electricians, a plumber, a kitchen fitter and a decorater all working in my house at the same time. I’m thinking ‘Flipping heck, this is absolute mayhem’ – they were standing on each other, getting in each other’s way. And to top it all, they’d put the wrong sized doors in. I needed 30” wide doors, and they’d put 27”. They looked at me like I was mad or something. But I can’t get my dad in the house in his wheelchair with 27” doors.
I got the big boss down and they’re telling me I’m going mad with all this stress. They told me that the Loss adjuster would laugh at my 27” doors complaint. The insurance people came round and I told them about my dad in a wheelchair. ‘Apart from broom cupboards and toilets, all doors are 30” wide. 30 inches it is.’ He said. House on hold again.
I’m at the stage now where I just want it finishing. It’s nearly done, but now they’ve found that the double glazing seal on the conservatory is breaking down…
I just want it to be my home again – get in and start on the garden and landscaping.
Just prior to the original flood, I’d had a windfall and paid 14 thousand pounds off my mortgage. If I hadn’t sank all that cash in the house, I’d have walked away. If it happened again, they could reposess. I’m never putting myself and my family through that again.
A year full of crap and false promises – they promise you the world, they get the job, and then they do what they want. If you complain you’re labelled as ‘highly strung’. A year of my life has been on hold while I’ve been passed from pillar to post and waited for people.
There was one point where my lizard had escaped – he’d taken refuge in a cupboard and there was me and four men trying to get him out. He cowered there, making the most horrendous noise – backed into a corner with nowhere left to go. I know exactly how he felt. My whole year was like that one moment.

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