double destruction

Sadly the relaxation gained at the beach game to a grinding halt upon returning home.  In the midst of all the previous damage, our basement had flooded a bit in a previous storm.....

Ben and I were in Breck with Molly and Brandon and I saw the storm on radar and called Ryan to turn the sprinklers off.  When he walked to the basement to do that, he noticed the water.  Thanks to he and his dad, we got the mess mitigated quickly and dried out fast too.  MeeMee came to the rescue with some giant fans and we were thankful to have recovered.

The second flood was much worse in terms of rainfall and Ryan was out of town for work while I was at the beach.  Jim had stopped by to see if we had water and we knew as we landed that we were going home to quite a mess.  The ground was just so saturated from our very wet Spring that even the new builds around us suffered flooding.  This time the carpet had already been wet for 24 hours + so we landed at 6 pm, drove out to MeeMee's to pick up Ben and got started cutting and ripping carpet out about 9 pm.  We decided to head to bed about 1 and started back in the next day.  I called Ryan to come home from work when I noticed the desk he built in the office was sucking water up the legs.  We got back to work and by sometime VERY late Saturday (about 52 hours later) we had removed all the carpet and pad from the basement.

We were motivated to finish as we were slated to leave for Breck Sunday afternoon. Just as we were leaving, we discovered the computer hard drive had crashed.  A neighbor stepped in and helped with a back-up from time machine so we could get on the road, but we realized later that the drive was kaput.  (You'll never know reading the blog years from now, but this crash meant my already behind-blogging was almost 3 months behind when I got back to it.)

I drove separately to Breck as Ben and I planned to stay longer and at one point while needing to move from the very crowded check-in parking, my car wouldn't start.  It turned out to be some combination of lights on that I discovered when retrieving Luke, and thankfully it started.  To say I was at my boiling point at that moment would have been an understatement and I considered hauling Ben and Luke to a nearby grassy area and bawling or screaming or having a very loud conversation with the universe.  Lots of deep breaths helped me keep my composure and I stopped Ryan from banging on the "just closed" auto parts store door in a nearby town.  You can bet I opened a beer FIRST THING upon entering our room. :)

SO MANY bags of wet carpet and pad.  Thankfully large-item-pickup was only a week away.

You can see what was the floor of the coal storage 80 + years ago.  Leveling it for a more flood-friendly floor may prove difficult.