Just to put you in the picture the building consists of my shop and the cellar, then above the shop are 3 flats
The boiler in the flat directly above the shop finally died and quite literally spewed gallons of water out - and of cause water only travels in one direction, down! and that means coming through my ceiling into the shop
Fortunately it happened whilst I was at the shop and I have in my cellar the water shut off taps for all parts of the building...so I shot down stairs only to be met by what seemed to be countless taps (the water system in this building is crazy!) so the dilemma was which do I switch off - only thing for it was to turn them all off
Back up in the shop the water didn't stop or even seem to be slowing down...so I went back into the cellar and checked, yes all taps were off...Time to call my hero..Dad!
He told me of another tap that was in a completely different part of the cellar to all the other taps - I found it, turned it off and headed back upstairs...shortly afterwards I started to notice the water was slowing down
I put a call into the Landlord who had only bought the building 3 weeks prior, and all credit to him he was at the shop within 15mins, followed shortly by my Dad who had come out of work to help me...
Stock was ruined, the ceiling tiles were ruined, the carpet tiles were ruined...I could have cried
But when running your own business you soon learn you have to take the bad with the good...and this wasn't the end of the world, and if nothing else I'd had a free shower! :-)
I put a claim into the insurance company straight away and due to all the bad weather we were experiencing at the time they were inundated with masses of claims for burst and therefore due to it not being classed as a large claim they wouldn't send a loss assessor, I just needed to provide invoices for all that I was claiming for.
This I did duly and 8 weeks later after much tooing and froing I finally got paid out for the lost stock, but once they take the excess off there really didn't seem a lot left...
So this week I have finally been able to get the floor sorted and the carpet tiles were relaid on Tuesday and next Thursday they are coming to redo all the ceiling tiles
It was just nice to get the display stands back in place and stock back to where it should be rather than it being crammed around the shop and generally making the place look untidy
No comments:
Post a Comment