A Home Rescued
How a Malvern couple
saved their 1920s-era
Shaker house after a
winter catastrophe:
Lessons for all
Shaker homeowners
BY DIANA SIMEON
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CAROLINE HELLER
38 SHAKERONLINE.COM | FALL 2014
6”
Bari and Scott Garfield will never forget
returning home from vacation last winter.
“It was 11 o’clock at night and bitterly cold outside,” recalls Bari.
The couple, tired from their journey, entered their Malvern-area home
through the back door and turned on the lights.
Then they saw it.
“Water was cascading down from the ceiling,” says Bari.
“We were shocked. ‘What is this? What did we walk into?’”
Unfortunately, the couple had arrived back in Shaker
Heights to discover a homeowner’s nightmare: a broken
pipe that had been spraying water for days.
In this case, the pipe, which carried cold water to
the second floor, had burst inside the wall between the
Garfield’s front foyer and dining room. “The continuous
flow of water caused a six-inch hole to be blown out,”
explains Bari. “And water sprayed up, then cascaded from
the ceiling to the doors, walls, and floor.”
The couple turned the water main off, then got an
up-close look at what had happened to their home, which was
built in 1927. “We were so shocked. At first, we didn’t know what
to do,” says Bari.
The original mahogany woodwork in the foyer was drenched and
completely covered with a white, filmy substance. Veneer was peeling off the
glass-paneled French door between the foyer and the front hall. The home’s
massive front door had soaked up so much water it had buckled, allowing the
winter’s arctic cold to pour into the house.
Opening the foyer’s closet, whose French folding door had also absorbed
gallons of water, the couple found icicles. “Everything inside the closet was wet
and soggy,” says Bari. That included the leaves to the dining room table and
a collection of antique linens, including a lace tablecloth handmade by Bari’s
grandmother. Rust from metal hangers had stained much of the material.
But it got worse. “The wood floors in the front hall were buckled, almost a
U shape, and the walls were dripping with water,” says Bari. That included the
dining room, where the walls had been hand-painted by the Cleveland Heights
artist Michael Romeo.
Meanwhile, after spraying into the foyer, the water had seeped through
to the basement.
“We went downstairs and found the water was draining into a utility
closet,” says Bari. The closet was located below the foyer. Part of the ceiling had
collapsed, while the walls and floor were severely damaged. “Much of what was
stored in the closet was also ruined. A nearby storage area was soaked with
water, as was the boiler room floor. There were puddles all over.”
Still, there was some good news: The basement recreation room, which has
the same original wood floors as the rest of the house and which the Garfields
had recently renovated, seemed unscathed. “We had just refinished that area, so
you can only imagine how thankful we were that it hadn’t been touched.”
Taking A Leap
That same evening, the Garfields called their insurance company, which told
them to get in touch with ServPro, a company that specializes in water damage.
“But ServPro had been having a lot of calls,” says Bari. “The local ServPro
representatives were overwhelmed and they were calling groups from other