My Weekend, part 2

After we finished eating, we headed home. It took longer than usual, but we didn't run into any unusual obstacles-other than seeing a lot of flooded yards, including our local park.

In an effort to relax, I decided to take a bath. I couldn't get the water to heat up! It was luke warm at best. Not knowing anything about the pipes or workings of the house, it didn't make sense to me when Josh ran frantically to the basement door.

I figured it out pretty quickly--our hot water heater was in the basement, which was flooded up to the fourth stair from the top, about 6 feet or so. Not only was the hot water heater under water, but it was FLOATING in the basement, along with a lot of other things that I don't even want to think about right now.

We rent our home, so Josh called the landlord and left a message. It went something like this, "Um, the water in the basement is almost to the top. I'm not sure what to do. I've never had a flooded basement before." Well, the landlord didn't call back until the next afternoon, so he wasn't much help. We called the fire department to see if they could come pump the basement before it came into the rest of the house. They said that they could not-we could call them back if we needed rescued or evacuated.

Josh went to Home Depot to see if they had any sump pumps left. They were turning people away at the door. So, my brilliant husband bought one of those decorative pumps that go in fountains. They pump water too! He got the pump up (down?) and running around 8:00pm Saturday. It rained until around 6:30pm Sunday. The pump ran the whole time, other than maybe about 4 hours that Josh took to sleep.

On the news, we saw video of a mobile trailer on the INTERSTATE; it had floated about 3/4 of a mile in the flood to the road, where it crashed into cars and semis.



What we went through was nothing compared to so many of the people who live in the area. Most of our damage was Saturday night; We spent all day Sunday wondering if we were going to have to leave our house because of the nearby river, but we were fine. Josh's quick thinking Saturday night saved us from the disaster that it could have been.

Monday, everything everywhere was closed. In fact, the schools in Metro Nashville STILL aren't back in session. It took us most of Monday and Tuesday morning to get the basement completely cleaned out. Pretty much everything was ruined. Josh did manage to save some of our wedding pictures, but pictures from high school (Australia!) and college are gone. Baby pictures of Keira are gone too, but I think we have some of those on the computer. Cleaning up was hard to do because it reminded me of what was down in the basement. It would've been better for my soul if someone else could've cleaned our house and we could've cleaned theirs!

We are almost back to normal now, though. We do have a huge (okay, three huge piles) pile of junk on the curb waiting to be picked up. And, our air conditioning is still out because the ducts that were in the basement were soaked through. The only other problem is the SMELL. Our house stinks like mildew-it is raising out of the basement and part of the carpet in the den where we carried our soiled goods.

I'm going to go light some candles and spray some Lysol. Not in that order-because then we might have another disaster on our hands.