The House and the flood...

Here are some pics of our "not so new anymore" house. I am attaching "before we moved in" pics because I am embarrassed that after almost 6 months I still have no pictures on the wall. I can't make up my mind on what I want to do so I just do nothing! Pathetic, I know. Anyway, here are the pics...

The garage entryway...

Austin's room...future office room

Now...the flood...

The day before Halloween our basement flooded! The WHOLE THING! 4-6 inches of MUD and WATER in the whole basement! I look at these pictures and it still feels surreal. We had an outside water line break right by one of our window wells (which is not covered by homeownders insurance). The water went up under the window well and filled the window well. There was so much pressure on the window that it broke the window and continued to fill the basement. Luckily, we were only gone for an hour and a half or it would have just continued to fill up! We just happen to have bigger water lines than most people (which is good for most things just not when you are filling up a basement) so it filled up quicker than it would have if we had smaller water lines. The basement wasn’t 100% (only about 80%) finished however we did have our office down stairs. We had two computers, two desks, a printer, my treadmill, our fire-safe box (which we realized is only fire safe NOT water safe), our food storage, about 50% of the kids toys and some storage bins that were all downstairs. We had carpet in the hallway that we had to throw away. Our computers luckily were not completely ruined…after cleaning all the mud out of them we only had about $500 in damage to both of them. We threw away a whole bunch of cords, three toy boxes and about 2 dozen toys BUT my treadmill still works if I start it on a higher incline than the first level…lol. Even with all that we lost, Chris and I still feel really blessed because it could have been so much worse. Chris is actually thinking about moving the waterline so IF it broke again it wouldn’t go in the window well. But that will be a big job so he isn’t sure yet. Here are the pics…yes, it will be OK to cry along with me.

Thank goodness for family! All of Chris' brothers and sisters who lived in town at the time showed up to help clean up. We couldn't have done it without them! His sisters are all so tuff! They just get in there and do what needs to be done!

It took about 4 months to clean all these cables and everything else that was in the basement. Besides the carpet being gone it actually looks as good as new...almost! We are even working on finishing our first room down there...the cold (food) storage room!

You can see the line where the water was before we started pumping it out...