Holding down the fort

Andrew, Andrew, Andrew...you had one job to do while I was away. 

One. Job.

I asked him to hold down the fort. That's it! 

And just look at this mess!

For the record, I don't actually blame Andrew for this one little bit. We had a terrible storm come through on August 29 (unrelated to Hurricane Idalia) that brought so much rain that our basement flooded...again. Andrew said there was water spraying through the foundation (much worse than the videos I posted here from the first time we had portions of our foundation waterproofed) and the entire basement had about half an inch of water in it before anyone realized it was a problem.

Actually, saying the whole basement might be an exaggeration. The storage room definitely had a considerable amount of water in it, and the girls' bedroom was leaking again, but the water in the main part of the basement was just hugging the edges of the carpet, so Rachel didn't realize things were wet until she stepped on the carpet in front of the basement bathroom door when she was on the way to brush her teeth.

That's precisely how we figured out we were starting to flood the last time (during an actual hurricane though). 

This time it looks like we got about 5 inches all at once again that evening (which is how much rain we got with Hurricane Delta). Apparently 5 inches is too much rain. Our neighbour Janelle told me that she could see a sheet of water just rushing down the hill toward our house and thought to herself things were not going to go well for us (and she started pulling out her fans before I even texted her to ask if we could borrow some).

Here's the water data chart, showing 1.70 inches at 7:00 PM:

And 6.76 inches by 9:30 PM:

This time was a lot worse than last time.

Admittedly, our basement is always in some sort of state of disarray, but it's not as messy as it seems with this peek through the doorway! It's only that messy because a bunch of stuff had been hauled out of the storage room already. This is the "Lego Area" and it wasn't flooded quite as badly...so that's where stuff was moved to, though it still was getting wet...

Now the storage room...that was a disorganized mess...that we'd been meaning to get around to reorganizing once our summer trips were over, once I'd finished writing my thesis, once...you know. Like, we knew it needed to happen but we just hadn't done it yet. It's very easy to get things out of the storage room, but putting them away properly is another matter entirely.

Don't get me started on the bag of flour on the floor; it's supposed to go on the shelf. In my perfect world, nothing is on the floor (though Reid suggested even putting pallets or something down and putting our boxes that must be on the floor on top of the pallets, because then they're at least not on the ground, which is a really good idea; everything on the shelves is fine, so pallets would just...lift everything off the floor).

The Lego Area, of course had a bunch of Lego out, which the kids were sad to have to clean up so quickly (because their haste meant they had to destroy some things).

The girls' room was also pretty bad:

Reid, Rachel, Benjamin, and Andrew worked hard for several hours. Then Rachel went to sleep over at Grandpa's...since her bed was sitting in the middle of her room, covered in stuff...and they had early morning seminary the next day. And Benjamin went to bed. And Andrew kept working, working, working until around 5:00 in the morning.

They managed to get the bulk of our stuff in one corner of the garage:

Andrew was vacuuming up tanks and tanks of water with our shop vac, hardly making a dent in things. 

He ended up calling in a restoration crew to help vacuum out the water. They also ripped up the carpet and set up a billion fans all around. Cleverly, they just ripped up sections and then set the carpet fans to blow under the carpet. We didn't think to do that the last time—our whole basement is like a little carpeted balloon right now. Those fans are just running, running, running, trying to dry everything off.

Miraculously—and if you know what irresponsibly voracious readers my children are, you will immediately know how miraculous this is—only one (1) book was left on the floor! Unfortunately, it was one of Zoë's favourite books—The One and Only Ivan. Fortunately, we'd bought her the set of The One and Only Ivan, The One and Only Bob, and The One and Only Ruby for her birthday because it was cheaper to buy all three together rather than simply buying her the sequels, so she wasn't too upset about the loss of this chapter book (it's one she chose from our neighbour's Little Free Library).

One book, one bag of flour, a handful of air filters...$2500 for the emergency restoration crew...$7000 forthcoming to put in a vapor barrier and gravity drainage system (oh, mylanta)...plus new drywall for the girls' room (which we're thinking of just doing ourselves (because, well, we're being forced to spend $10,000 on this project as it is)...is that crazy?)...and...and...and...

We didn't come out too badly.

Things truly could have been a lot worse!

Our plans to renovate the cursed hallway bathroom have once again been put on hold, but things could have been a lot worse!

Do I think it's ridiculous that home owner's insurance doesn't cover things like this? Absolutely, I do. Will we look into the National Flood Insurance Program that we didn't even realize is what we'd need to cover an event like this? Absolutely, we will.