Last Thursday night, approximately 6 inches of rain fell in 2 hours where I live. In almost 5 years living in our house, we have never had water leak into the basement, until now. Friday morning we found our basement ankle deep in water that backed up through the shower drain. People all over our city had water in their basement from this storm. I should have taken a picture of our street on garbage day because everyone had furniture and carpet piled high on the street. Our basement is 3/4ths finished and half of it is carpeted. Well, it was carpeted. I spent Sunday and Monday evenings ripping up soaking wet carpeting that was glued to the cement floor. It was not a lot of fun, but I am glad to be rid of the stinky wetness. Now my basement floor looks like this.
This is actually the floor after I pulled up the first piece of carpet, but the rest of it is out now. It was a lot easier on Monday when my brother was able to help me pull it up. So now the really crappy part of my story is that my home owners insurance covers none of this damage because it came up through a drain pipe. I have to add a rider to my insurance to cover this specific cause of damage. Fortunately, our damage was not as bad as most of our neighbors. We lost the carpet, a few toys, and probably some furniture, but it is all just stuff. By the grace of God, I moved my computer upstairs about 2 weeks ago. That would have been really bad. We will be washing a lot of stuff and I haven’t made it to my Christmas decorations yet. Hoping that nothing critical is unsaveable.
Now I get to redo my basement and this time, no carpet. We are going to put down vinyl tile and throw rugs. everything else is getting stored in plastic bins. We will have to purchase some new furniture at some point, but that is okay because it gives me an excuse to go to IKEA.
