My vacation

The water line on one of my basement walls, before the demolition. The water was full of mud.

I'm still reeling from the latest disaster in The Year From Hell, but things are looking much better now. It's been nearly a week (last Monday morning) since I got up, showered and got ready for work, went downstairs in the dark--and stepped in ankle-deep water! The entire lower floor was submerged and it's (or WAS) a nice, finished, walk-out basement. My son's large studio bedroom is down there, with lots of his things, a full, nice bathroom and a very large living/family room full of furniture, TV, books, and all sorts of personal things. The water line on the walls was 11 1/2 inches, nearly a foot of water, and it came from a city storm sewer failure during a rainstorm we had last Sunday night. My sump pump simply couldn't keep up with the onslaught, it was like a tidal wave, knocking over shelves and bookcases.


One corner of the demolished basement.

I couldn't even bear to write about it, at first. It's such a shocking thing to lose books from my childhood that were given me by my Aunt and Grandmother, both long since passed. My son's high school yearbooks, stuff from college and grade school--books I read to him as a baby--all ruined, as was furniture, computer equipment, movies, games and electronic equipment. I was pretty distraught on Monday evening as the cleanup crew were stripping the ruined (new) carpet and floor tiles. They had to cut out the bottom of each wall because the water soaked upwards, to dry inside the walls. The insulation had to be pulled and thrown away, the frames and baseboards ripped off and discarded. All of the regular doors and my two pocket doors were torn out and thrown on two huge heaps of debris, outside. My once very nice, comfortable basement has been gutted and looks like a demolition site.

Even though I had to go down there constantly all last week, it's only stopped being painful yesterday. I have lots of vacation time accrued so I went in to work each day for only about 1 -2 hours and then came back home to deal with the cleaning and drying out, insurance, adjusters and all. The phone rang constantly, and people were showing up in work vans to check water readings, move fans, etc. for the entire week. My insurance only covers the actual cleaning, not contents or disposal. The cleaning costs were so high that they used up all of the insurance money like lighting a match to paper. And I had to pay the deducible, $500, before the crew even started. That was part of my mortgage money for November.

SLA came over for a few hours that first, horrible night. A friend of VMan came over on Thursday and helped me dig through the wet piles in seach of anything salvagable. We dragged a few things back in and the help and support made me feel a whole lot better (although my leg and back have been killing me since then, that stuff was wet and very heavy). I had been going to call the kids on Tuesday, as they were moving back up here (into the basement!) this coming Monday, but my son called me to tell me that they would be arriving on Sunday or Monday. I told him the sad story about all of his lost items and asked if they could come up any sooner to help. Well, they arrived last night! And I was glad to see them. VMan's friend has a trailer and an available dumpster, so today we are loading up the huge piles of ruined stuff and hauling them away.

Needless to say, I'm NOT having the planned Open House tomorrow. And, ironically, my house was listed in the newspaper for the very first time on Wednesday! Just when it is in no condition to show to anyone. Sigh. My house will be off the market until the basement is put back together, an extensive and expensive job and I certainly have no "extra" money to spend on it. It's really really got to get much better than this. Oh, and work, even though I was only there about 10 or 12 hours this entire week, was very very interesting, in a bad sort of way. But this is enough woe is me for today! Have a great weekend!