Six Months in a Leaky Boat

More like six hours in a leaky basement...Today was entirely not how I expected it to be. I had a lot of work to do and had a meeting-free day in which to do it. Figured I'd get a lot done, get home at the normal time, record a podcast and generally chill out. Unfortunately, our basement had other plans.

It had been raining pretty heavily since Saturday night and we figured we'd get some water in our basement; there are cracks in the foundation, so we usually get a little. And for the larger amounts, our sump pump would kick in and pump the water out. But this morning, it wasn't working and there was about four inches of water in the basement. We had a call in to our plumber to have him swing by and get the sump pump going again. But we never heard back from him and by mid-morning, my mother-in-law had already spent a few hours in ankle-deep water, bailing the nasty stuff into her washing machine and using the rinse cycle to get rid of it. Pretty smart, actually. But she needed help, so I went home at noon and spent the rest of the day clearing out the water.

The basement is unfinished, mainly just a repository for old junk and boxes of stuff. Figuring the plumber wasn't going to show up, I called in a neighbor from down the street who had lent us his spare sump pump. He came over to check out our pump and we determined that there was nothing wrong with the pump, it was the outlet the thing was plugged into. No juice there. We hooked up the other pump across the room and ran the hose out the dryer vent and were in business. The water's down below the pump now, but we also spent a lot of time removing water-damaged stuff from the basement. There's a lot more work to do.

But at least it stopped raining finally. This was the worst rainstorm we've had since May 2006, when we had some flooding as well, although not as much. Some towns got nearly a foot of rain. The good news is the weather is supposed to warm up in a hurry, hitting the 50s and 60s for the rest of the week. When the basement finally dries out, we'll be getting rid of a lot of unnecessary junk. The garbage crew will get a workout this week.