Our House: Rain, rain, go away

Well...it rained and rained and rained last night. At 9pm Dave went downstairs to put some laundry in. At 10pm, he went back down to get laundry out of the dryer. He found about a half inch of water on the floor of one side of the basement.

So we got the shop vacs going and started bailing out the water, going in and out the hatch way, dumping it in the driveway, and doing it over and over. We thought we were doing well. But then we noticed that the water was spreading throughout the whole basement. Now it wasn't just one section that had water, the whole floor was covered. So we kept bailing. After about 4 hours of bailing, the water was even higher. It was going over the toes of my boots. We were both soaked. Dave's pants were actually falling down because they were so soaked. It was so frustrating to be working so hard and we just weren't getting anywhere. Of course, I just stood there and cried for a few minutes. There was one little spot in the foundation where the water had broken through from the outside and was actually pouring through like a small faucet. We tried to plug it up with chewing gum. That didn't work. Dave hunted for something to plug it up, and came downstairs with marshmallows. Of all things, the marshmallows worked!

By 2am, we decided that we were just wasting our energy trying to bail it out. It just kept rising. So we decided to just trying to get anything important off the floor and head to bed. Dave got up at 6:30am and went to Home Depot right when they opened. He measured the water, it was 7 inches deep. He set up a sump pump and it's been running all day. What a nightmare. A bunch of out stuff is floating around the basement. We have no heat, the furnace shut itself off because the water got inside it. So we've been bundled up wearing winter hats and layers. It's going to be a joy to clean up once it's all pumped out.

This photo is from last night, when we decided to give up and resume in the morning.