First Major Crisis!

So far, our adventures in home ownership had been fairly calm and about what we expected...until last week. About a week and half ago I was walking into our kitchen and noticed that the floor felt different in one specific place. I pointed it out to Andrew, along with a new crack in the linoleum that I'd never seen before. The difference wasn't incredibly noticeable, so I think Andrew thought I was crazy. But hey, I'm a detail person. I notice these types of things! I should have investigated it further, but figured I was probably just being paranoid.

Then 4 or 5 days later, I saw this in our living room:

I instantly started freaking out, saying I'd never seen that before. I knew something was wrong. Andrew tried to calm me down, saying that it was probably there before and I just didn't notice. I knew I would have noticed something like this the very first time we looked at the house. Then I asked if he'd looked behind the refrigerator lately (it's directly on the other side of this wall). Well, obviously this is a stupid question. Who just randomly decides to look behind their fridge? 

Thanks to Andrew for immediately rushing to the fridge and pulling it out without hesitating to call me out on my dumb comment. Sure enough, he found water. The fridge water line had been leaking since we hooked it up 3 weeks ago. I started panicking even more, rendering myself completely useless. Lucky for me, Andrew seemed to know exactly what to do. He unhooked the water line and then pulled off the trim at the bottom of the built-in shelf and found standing water. He shoved rags under it and then took apart the shelf so he could pull out the bottom piece. We soaked up all the water and then put rice down to soak up any more. We also put a fan on it.

The next day Andrew made the decision to pull up several pieces of the wood. As he did, we realized he'd made the right decision. The pieces were soaked and would have taken weeks to dry out. He pulled out as many pieces as he could and then pried the rest up with a flat bar. We kept the fan on it for at least another 24 hours.

After we got all of that taken care of, Andrew looked in the bottom of our pantry (which is right next to the fridge) for water. He didn't find much, but he did find a bean that had fallen down into the corner near the fridge. It had begun to sprout. If only we'd looked there sooner we would have known something was weird. Haha...

I'm happy to report that now, 5 days later, the sub-floor is dry, the wood seems mostly dry, and the cracks have lightened up significantly. We haven't really seen any signs of warping, but now we're struggling with how to get all those pieces back in as tightly as they were before. Also, we took apart the shelf and ruined the drywall on the corner of the wall. Oh well, I guess we were going to get rid of that shelf anyway! 

I think it's safe to say that for now we've averted any major crises. It was definitely not the best introduction to home-ownership, though!