Our Water Adventure

Why haven't I blogged for a month? Well a few reasons - we have been outside a lot this summer and I would rather be outside than starring at a computer. Another reason, I have been updating myself on everyone elses blogs and then it gets too late for me to update my own blog. I am sure no one can relate! But the biggest reason is the past few weeks we have been dealing with a lot of water. Our basement flooded about 2.5 weeks ago. Our washer's drainage hose came disconnected and ran the rinse cycle for 6 hours. But instead of filling up the washer with water it would just drain out the hole where the drainage hose connects. Lovely. So I woke up to a very wet basement.

I called our landlords to let them know this fabulous news. They were driving up to Yellowstone for vacation and am sure I pretty much ruined their vacation. Rob and I felt like we were moving again while we carried up all of our belongings from the basement to our garage, living room and family room. As you can imagine our house was a mess.

I borrowed my neighbor's shop vac to get rid of the standing water in the laundry room and then borrowed my grandma's carpet cleaner to suck up the water in the carpet and pad. Rob and I sucked up 45 gallons of water which took several hours. Our next adventure was to get the carpet out of the basement. All I can say is luckily our basement is small and there are only 2 small rooms and a hallway of carpet to take out because wet carpet is heavy!! We took the carpet out on our neighbors driveway (they had moved) because it was such a hot, sunny day we figured it would dry well outside.

Well Rob got ready for work and left while I continued to suck up water. I used the carpet cleaner again, what a great invention, to suck up as much water as I could from the carpet pad. As luck would have it, about 45 minutes after we got the carpet outside it began to rain. Rob was at work at this point so I was running around like a crazy women bringing everything into the garage. I was quite the site carrying the carpets all by myself. We also had some stuff drying on our back patio that I quickly picked up and brought inside.

Later that evening when I had dealt with as much water as I could handle, the kids and I headed to Home Depot to get some of those huge carpet blowers to dry the pad out. But before that stop we decided to stop at Micky D's for some Happy Meals and playtime in the play area. I needed a break from the flood and the kids had been deprived all day. Evan and Lily had a blast playing and I just sat and relaxed for a moment. I felt pretty good since I had had a chance to shower before we headed out and spent the moment forgetting about the day's events.

Next we went to Home Depot for the carpet blowers. The kids loved helping me get them to the car because they are on wheels so Evan pulled one and Lily and I pulled the other. Once home I got the blowers doing their job and started to go through some of the boxes that got wet in our storage room. My mom showed up with 8 plastic storage bins and helped me transfer things from boxes to the bins. Great idea Mom. Luckily our only losses were 7 board books. We had several boxes get wet but nothing damaged inside of them.

We let the pads dry for over a week and then our landlords came and relaid the carpet. After the carpet was back installed I cleaned all the carpets downstairs and decided to go for it and clean all the carpets in the house. Our last thing on this fun adventure was to get everything back downstairs. We have most everything back in the basement except our guest bed. Rob and I were tired of carrying things downstairs so hopefully soon that bed will get in it's room and we will be back to normal.

So the positive out of this experience are:

1. All of my carpets are clean!
2. Things are reorganized and clean- well the playroom stayed organized for about 30 seconds until Lily and Evan invaded.
3. I am ready for the next flood - all my things are in plastic bins not cardboard boxes
4. I will check the hoses on my washer regularly

Don't feel bad for us, we really have had a great August with many trips to Thanksgiving Point gardens, children's gardens, and dinosaur museum. We also had a great weekend trip up to Logan to visit Rob's brother's family and go to the Logan Temple. Our dear friends, Reed and Andrea Reichwald, also visited us for a night. We met them in Minnesota and had a great time catching up and seeing how big their girls are getting. Olivia and Evan started where they left off in Minnesota or #8 as Evan calls it (that was the # of our townhouse). They played well and didn't want to part. We had a fun summer and are now ready to get back into routine with school in session.