Horrible Sunday

Almost every Sunday we go to Johnny's parents' house, eat, relax, and just have a calm day.

Well, not today.

On the way out, we usually walk down 4 or 5 steps into the family room to get to the garage door where the cars are. Currently, the family room is "under construction." So, there's cement floor, studs, and boxes of everything on the floor. It gets kind of messy down there, so we have a path of flat cardboard pieces making a makeshift walkway.

Today, I stepped off the bottom step onto the cardboard like any other day .... and sank. The cardboard was floating on inches of water. Like a slo-mo scene I looked up and it all slowly processed from what my eyes were seeing to my brain realizing that every inch of the family room, the laundry room, the bathroom down there and the crawlspace was completely under water!

It seems our sump pump must have failed sometime during the night or early morning, with all this rain and then when the water had nowhere else to go - it just kept rising.

I grabbed my rainboots and immediately started moving boxes of our stuff up to the garage, or on top of dry items. The boxes were so soggy and wet, they were just falling apart in my hands. And, each box I picked up would just POUR out water as you lifted it.

Thankfully, Johnny's dad ran to Menards and got us a replacement pump. While that was happening, I pried off the drain cover from the floor in front of the furnice with a chisel and amazingly the water started swirling down. Then, as the new pump was installed, all the water was cleared within about 15 minutes.

Unfortunately -- THAT pump broke, too, after only an hour!!! We ran back to Menards to return it and saw a man in line in front of us returning the same pump. So, we got a different brand and this one seems to be working fine, thank God.

It's just SUCH a kick-in-the-ass situation because the majority of ruined things weren't down there just a few weeks ago!! Cleaning up for the Superbowl party, Johnny boxed up all of his DVDs (read: hundreds) and put them down there, all of his video game systems and games and put them down there, and all of our board games!!! Just this past week Johnny has been clearing out his office and sorting through boxes of things and organizing. Some of these boxes were LITERALLY just brought down there last night!!! Also, I've been setting up my bookcases and was just in the crawlspace two nights ago and mentioned to Johnny that I should bring up more of the stuff - but I didn't!!! Arrrrgh, I wish I could press rewind.

And, believe it or not, this is the second time my stuff has been flooded! Before I moved in with Johnny, I was living in Prince Edward Island, Canada. My stuff was all up there, I closed the house up for the winter and left the key and the care in charge of a contractor who was hired to do work while I was out of the house (like I'd done the year before). Except - this year, the work didn't go as planned and the PIPES FROZE before the plumber ever made an appearance and the results were disasterous.

Johnny's taking off work tomorrow to try and get started on cleaning up the aftermath, but I unforunately have a HUGE work obligation I can't get out of - so I'll have to wait until Tuesday to help and start the sorting through my boxes.

Hopefully this is the last time my stuff gets flooded. I don't know how much more I can take!!