Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Wade in the Water

We were enjoying a fun-filled evening of flashlight tag last night when Laina and I went into the basement to see if anyone was there. Laina said, "Why is the floor wet?" just as I was stepping onto the water soaked carpet at the bottom of the stairs.

I guess all the rain the past week was too much for the french drain and filled the pit in the basement to overflowing. We worked with what we had available last night (a system of duct tape, pvc pipe remnants, a battery, and an aquarium pump) and pumped out as much as we could. By 6:30am this morning, the water was all the way to the entrance of Laurin's room.

Thankfully, the lumber yard is open that early and Paul made a trip to get a sump pump. It's doing its job perfectly, so we shouldn't have this problem again. The guy who owned the house assured us that it had never overflowed in the 12 years he owned the house. I guess we're just lucky.

Thankfully I had almost everything in plastic totes downstairs, so it was just a matter of moving things upstairs for a while. We had to take out all the carpet we put in (our freebies) and throw away the carpet pad. Hopefully we can dry the carpet out as the padding soaked up most all the water there. We have three fans going downstairs now, and I have been using the steam cleaner to suction water out of Laurin's carpet. I was going to take a picture and post it, but it was too depressing.

Ahh, the joys of home ownership.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Daddy wants to talk to Paul about a permanent cure for the problem. He doesn't think the sump pump is all that is required.