Great Flood of '08

Did I fool you? We've been on our long awaited vacation for the last few weeks. Our trip to the south was wonderful and it flew by, as fun times usually do. On the other hand, it is so good to be home and to have the kids (and ourselves) in our own beds. I have a mountain of laundry (clean, and finally folded) upstairs ready to be distributed to the appropriate drawers and closets.

We arrived home in the late evening last Saturday to our happy home and noticed that the lawn looked quite nice~ we had heard that our area got good rain in the last few weeks. The next morning, on the way out the door headed towards church, Tim went downstairs to turn on the outside water for the sprinklers and I heard those dreaded words.

"Mandie, I think we have a problem."

The carpet section closest to the sump pump was very wet and the sump well was filled to the brim. We overrode the sump sensor, which obviously wasn't working, and manually turned on the pump. Out the side of the house spewed probably over a hundred gallons of water. Since we only saw water on one side of the basement and we were already late for church, we decided to tackle the problem later.

So, later, after church and dinner and the kids were in bed, Tim and I went down to the depths to remove the wet carpet. We got the carpet a few months after we moved into our home after we saw an advertisement on Freecycle. Someone was getting rid of carpet in good condition and we were looking for free carpet, so God was very gracious to us in supplying such a nice addition to the cold hard basement concrete. The people we got it from even gave us carpet padding and everything. I went to grab a soda from the other end of the basement, which we thought was dry, and discovered that it was wet also. All of the basement carpet. All of the carpet pad. The carpet under the pantry shelves. The carpet under my craft table. The carpet under the bookshelves that hold our homeschooling books. The carpet under the craft shelves. All of the basement carpet. At that point my eyes grew really wide and I started mumbling to myself "It'll be ok. It was only free carpet. It was ugly carpet anyway. Don't panic! Our things will dry!" Only as we scrambled to remove everything off the carpet (which was pretty much everything in the basement)I realized how good God's mercy was to us. There was hardly anything not waterproof sitting directly on the carpet! I had all of the pantry items except one 10lb bag of sugar on the shelves or on top of Rubbermaid boxes. I had all of my scrapbook supplies and pictures on the craft shelves or on my work table. All of the books were off the floor and on the shelves. All my yards and yards of fabric were safely tucked in their plastic see-through boxes. Remember how I've did all that work trying to organize the basement? Praise God for His excellent providence!

Yes, that was a long night for Tim and me. We did have to rip up all of the soggy carpet and the wet sponge-like carpet pad. That was a lot of work and our backs are still aching. As we ripped up the carpet, we had to sweep and squeegie the water to the big sump drain in the corner of the basement. As I type this now, our household fans are drying out the concrete. The basement contents are in a state of total upheaval until the concrete dries completely, but how amazing that the only real loss in the flood was a 10 lb bag of sugar!