Flood

Did I really promise a post 12 days ago and just now deliver? What a slacker.

We have internet. Kind of. Using our phones as modems, we have a semi-useful free version of dial-up. Whether or not it's legal is debatable but the lady at the cell phone store gave us the go-ahead and we are taking it. No uploading, minimal downloading, and a teensy bit of streaming, but it's better than nothin'.

Our basement flooded. That was fun.

Just two months after we moved in, we had torrential rains. Six and a half inches in one night. If you could see our back yard, you would say "Heth! What did you expect?". It literally looks like stadium seating wrapping around our house. A tiered backyard, directing all water right at the house. I told Nate "The wise man built his house upon the rock and the foolish family bought the house at the bottom of the hill." But we love this house, we really do.

The whole story:

Our sump pump runs almost all the time, especially with all the rain we have had this year. We had super duper rains on the night of July 22nd. We woke up shortly after 4am to see our alarm clocks flashing. We had lost power at some point earlier. In a panic, afraid that our sump pump had quit working, we rushed downstairs. Nate's first step down to the carpet at the bottom was an audible "squish". An inch of water. We went into the utility room and strangely, the area around the sump pump was the only dry spot in the whole basement. As we squished around, unplugging things and trying to find the source of the water, we quickly discovered where it was coming from. The window wells. Two of the egress windows were filling with water during the downpours and water was pouring into the basement through any crack the water could find. The water was at our eye level and we were staring into the beady eyes of multiple frogs, swimming in their new pool. We stood there stunned. Neither of us had the first idea of what needed to be done.

Long story short, we dropped a sump pump down into the two to three feet of water in one of the window wells and pumped the water out. Then in the lightning and torrential rain, we dug around in the 5 inches of river rock at the bottom of the window wells looking for the drains. It took forever to find them, but we finally did. Once they were cleared, they kicked in, did their job, and kept up just fine. Nate and my Dad also dug a strategic trench in the yard in the middle of the lightning to direct the water away from the house.

We called in Servicemaster and they were able to save our carpet, we only lost the pad. We had to pull out some dry wall and a little bit of wet insulation. And then we got to pay out the wazoo for use of their industrial sized fans for five days. Eighteen of them, plus two commercial grade dehumidifiers. Fun times. Just what I wanted to spend my money on. Everything is dry and now we are looking at regrading our back yard, buying a back up battery operated sump pump, and refinishing our already finished basement.

Honestly though, when I get grumpy about it sometimes (often) I remind myself of how much worse it COULD have been. It could have been sewage, not clean rain water. It could have happened three days later when Nate was away for a week. We could have lost a whole bunch of new furniture, but we didn't have anything down there yet other than beds, a couple dressers, and rubbermaid totes. All we lost were a few books.

I don't sleep well when it rains at night, I'm not gonna lie. I feel anxiety creeping up and Nate and I both are quick to jump out of bed and grab a flashlight to check on the sump and the window wells. Once we get both of those issuses resolved, I think we will sleep better at night.

Sometime when I have access to a better internet connection, I'll upload some photos and a little video. If you are facebook friends with me, both are posted there.

The end.