When It Rains...

it pours.

Ever heard that saying? Well, I've had one of those weeks. The big finale (at least I hope it's the finale) began early yesterday morning when my husband woke me up at 3:40 am and told me that our basement was flooding. How could that even be possible? We live on the prairie! But with all the melting snow and heavy rain overnight, our backyard was a small lake and we had water about a foot up on our sliding glass door in the basement. That foot of water outside had leaked inside around the door and was covering every inch of our basement in 2 inches of water. Arrty called my dad (because that's what you do when you need something fixed) and he came out to the house and helped block the water from coming in. That was the easy part.

Arrty spent all day Monday getting the water out and when I got home we began the slow process of drying everything out. It took Monday evening and all day yesterday to get everything moved, the carpet up, and the things that weren't salvageable thrown away. One of the hardest parts was the books I lost. I had to throw away at least 6 boxes of books that were ruined. I looked through the first few to see what was in there, but after that I just carried them to the trash pile. I didn't want to know what was in there. It just made it worse. There were a few things that I checked on right away...the safe box holding birth certificates and other important documents and my scrapbooks. They were safe...or so I thought. For some reason Josh and Adam's first year scrapbooks were not on the shelf with all the others and were found yesterday afternoon after sitting on wet carpet for over a day. That's when I lost it and cried hysterically for about a minute and a half. Then I pulled myself together and made a plan. I ran into town and made color copies of all the pages and then laid them out to dry to see what could be saved. They aren't looking so good, so the color copies may have to work as replacements. But I will include a note to the boys reminding them that at one time their scrapbooks were lovingly handmade. Most everything else of significance was either well protected in Rubbermaid boxes or put on shelves. It looks like we will be able to save all the furniture. So we lost our carpet, lots of books, some jigsaw puzzles and board games, and a few other odds and ends.

Now we have to continue to dry out the concrete floor with fans and heaters and then put everything back where it belongs. It was bad, but certainly could have been much worse. It sure is a hard way to get the basement cleaned up.

Oh yeah, and did you know that homeowners insurance does not cover loss or damage caused by ground water? So it looks like we'll have no carpet in the basement for awhile. But the floor sure is clean!