Swamped

Literally. Our basement started gathering water on Monday with our nonstop pouring rain, and I tried to keep up with it with our 12-gallon shop vac. Ha ha. By the end of the day, we had three shop vacs going along the east wall of our basement and had the kids on shifts manning them (I had an incredibly sore back after going it alone for five hours already . . . though I did take more turns that night). Around 9:30 or 10 at night, we discovered water coming up through the two bedroom floors downstairs (with carpet, of course). That's when I gave up. And did the water enjoy having no restraints!

The kids were great, even enlisting the neighbor boy into helping as we took ALL their stuff from their rooms and set up a dormitory in the garage. Boys on one end, girls on the other. No wall yet, but with how long things will take, we may just have to move over our wall of wheat buckets (currently BY a wall in the garage) and put it as at least a minimum of a privacy barrier. Ah joy. But so far the older kids and Sim (who have to sleep in their new clubhouse) have taken this all very well. Maybe it's because they know if they complain they'll get put to work with their dad and me as we pull off baseboards, pull up carpets and pads, drill holes in the walls where the baseboards were (it is SO nice to have a brother-in-law formerly in the restoration business! We get all the tricks that may possibly save us from having to redo all our sheet rock!), and then prop up carpets on networks of food storage buckets, ladders, or whatever so we can have it off the floor as we run a fan under it all to dry them. Anybody follow that sentence? =) But seriously, the kids have been and are great with the whole thing. And now Steve and I are looking into at least repainting and eventually cleaning the carpets (when we've got everything else cleaned up and ready to go) before we reset all our downstairs. A face lift for the basement by necessity, lol!

And how are we making sure this never happens again? Especially when we supposedly already have a French Drain all around our house with a sump pump already in it? (Steve tracked down the builder and first owner of the house for details.) Well, Steve's already knocked a hole in the basement floor and put a sump pump in THAT to deal with the water under the house, and as soon as we have the rest of the plans for where the in-floor heating lines are down there, we'll pot another hole in the floor of the other side of the basement to put another sump pump there. French Drain with pump and two sump pumps in the basement itself. Judging on how our pumps right now are dealing with things (so another would give us more leeway), Steve and I think this solution will work. Hooray! Cause if it doesn't, our only other option is to put a SECOND French Drain out beyond the first as a barrier to THAT. At least we have options! =)

And now it's time to go check on my dripping carpets in the basement. (We dried them as much as we could before we pulled them up, but you can only suck up so much water with a shop vac.) At least it's not raining! =)