When Russ Roberts closed his home's front door behind him for a trip back to Chicago one day in October 2005, little did he realize that it would be nearly four years and $1.5 million before he would be able to live in the house again.

Three weeks later, a woman who was watching after Russ and Mary Roberts' home at 104 E. Sunrise Drive on Santa Fe's southwest side opened the door and was horrified as a wall of water gushed out.

Roberts said that not long after he left for Chicago, where he and his wife still had a home at the time, a small, deteriorated plastic nut connecting the main water line to a toilet tank slipped off the line, allowing the feeder tube to break away and unleashing a flood of biblical proportions.

The water had run unabated for nearly 21 days before it was discovered, dumping 160,500 gallons of water — enough to fill 61/2 swimming pools — into the Robertses' home, virtually destroying the house and everything in it.

The water bill for the disaster month came to more than $5,000, Roberts said, but was forgiven by the city under its one-time disaster assistance program.

Items destroyed or severely damaged included the floor heating system, large sections of insulation, the floors themselves, wood beams and supports, and most of the furniture and household items including Roberts antique clock collection. A grandfather clock simply melted into the water. The water rose to 4-feet deep in parts of the home. Basically, if it was in the house or part of the house, it was heavily damaged or ruined completely.

"It pretty much destroyed the whole house," Roberts said.

At first, the Roberts considered walking away from the mess and starting over in another home, or just staying in Chicago, where Roberts is professor emeritus at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

But Roberts said the insurance company, State Farm, refused to write the home off as a total loss, and compensated the Robertses accordingly.

"It would have basically been defaulting on the mortgage," Roberts said "I felt that if we just walked away, we would have been in an even bigger financial hole."

Plus, the Robertses had fallen in love with their Santa Fe community and their neighbors.

"It's the most friendly community," Roberts said. "The people are bright, thoughtful, well-educated. We felt we could never replace them — we could never replicate our friends here."

Roberts said they had come to Santa Fe for "the diversity and the culture, the weather and the sense of community."

They would not be deterred.

The Robertses turned to longtime homebuilder Ray Gee of Siteworks, whom friends had recommended and with whom the Robertses had worked on another real estate matter.

"This was the most difficult job I have ever done in terms of determining what to do and how to get it done," Gee said. "It was a textbook case of how everything that can go wrong did."

Gee and Roberts eventually ended up calling upon nearly 60 subcontractors — from plumbers and electricians to landscapers and heating experts, as well as Santa Fe architect Rad Acton. "Everywhere we looked we found waterlogged, mold-infested surfaces," said Acton, of Acton Architecture and Planning. "It was the worst I had ever seen."

"All the windows had to be replaced, all the doors had to be replaced. "The mold had gotten so deep into the windows that they were completely unsalvageable."

Architecturally, Acton said, the challenge was "to optimize the architectural potential of the house, not just fix the problem ... The idea was to create a coherent updated aesthetic for the house, thereby making the building a more healthy place" for the Robertses.

Klaus Voigtlander, owner of Edelwiess Restoration, was hired for the mold removal and restoration.

He said the black and green mold, after cooking and growing for weeks, had essentially taken over the house, climbing four, five or even six feet up the side of the walls. It was everywhere — seeming to feast on the waterlogged furniture, floors and the interior structures.

Just taking back the house from the mold cost $40,000, Roberts said. More than 200 tons of debris were removed from the home.

Roberts and the contractors said even much of the home's insulation, supposedly impervious to water damage, was destroyed by the vapors that had risen as steam from pools of water beneath the home.

"There were all kinds of things happening," Voigtlander said.

"One of the hardest parts of the job," Gee said, "was the inordinate amount of time it took to find the damage."

Acton said the concern was that "the discovery of the problems was not going to abate. ... The amount of work (to remedy all the problems) was indeterminate."

Although the flooding occurred in October 2005, restoration work could not begin until the summer of 2007, Gee said, after months of finding out the extent of the damage, the removal of the mold and everything it had destroyed.

The Robertses were able to move back in in March, and the final restoration was completed just a few weeks ago.

In the end, the home was transformed. "It didn't look like the same house," Gee said. It had even grown from its original 4,000 square feet to about 5,000 square feet.

"Ray Gee is really the hero here," Roberts said. "He performed countless miracles. He figured out everything that was wrong with the house. He was tenacious. He didn't walk away.

"He saved our lives. He saved our marriage."