april showers bring home disasters

It happened again.

The basement flooded.

Some of you will remember this happened to us exactly three years ago.

For us, April showers don't bring May flowers. It brings a flooded basement.

It was another freak happening: Brian woke up to find water in the 

basement and the sump pump not working. He discovered in the main circuit

breaker box, that the switch for the sump pump had tripped to "off". It

was the only switch that had done so. And why? No one seems to know.

So, here we go again with a restoration company and drying out the basement.

The owners of the restoration company - a family of 7 - worked their

tails off, carting load after load of  years of stuff that somehow accumulates

in basements, and stacking it all neatly in our garage.

 

 Some of the major furniture items were able to stay in the basement, like the

 couch, the table, and treadmill. The couch got a little bit of water on the bottom,

 but it's being dried out. All my bookcases were ruined though, and had to be

thrown out. Some books were ruined, too. The restoration people took our area

rugs and are treating them and drying them out in their warehouse. Hopefully,

they can be salvaged.

Not only is our garage filled, but the top of the bar has things piled

all over it, too. It's amazing how much "stuff" one accumulates after living

 in the same place almost 23 years.

They ran out of room to pile all my books, so some are piled in the living room.

Even the poor kitties are discombobulated. Normally, their cat boxes are

downstairs, so we had to bring them upstairs. I didn't exactly want a cat box

 in my living room, a bathroom, or our bedroom, so they went into the spare

 room/office.

Believe it or not, that's not even all the stuff we had in the basement.

There's also the unfinished part of the basement, AKA, the dungeon.

Huge Sterilite containers of out-of-season clothes, the cat tree, baby toys...

Shelves full of paint cans, tools, home repair stuff; a couple of

garment racks full of coats and sweaters due to lack of closet space.

Egads, how to start all over and clean all this stuff out and put it back together?

We sure have out work cut out for us.

But, that's not all. On top of the stove breaking the other day and having

to get a new one - which will be delivered on Tuesday - and now our

basement flooding, Brian went to open the garage door, and one of the

main springs broke. The garage door guy will be here Monday morning.

And if that's not enough, when the restoration man was here today to

check the humidity levels in the basement, he asked me if I knew that my

water softener was leaking from the bottom! I told him, no. He told me I'd

better call the water softener company immediately, as it could actually

explode if it malfunctioned. Talk about a high anxiety level! A serviceman from

the water softener company came out and looked at the softener and released

the pressure valve and turned the whole machine off. They will be installing

a new water softener on Monday.

Trying to keep a smile on my face and breathe. I know things could

be worse. We shall get through this. We somehow always do.