The Great Flood

It's been a week and a half since we had water in our basement.  It was after days and days of rain - and apparently our sump pump stopped working.

My typical behaviour would be to get fairly distraught and upset over something like this...something I really couldn't do anything about, yet I took it all in stride.  Even with the company we had staying with us, and the 'mommy' makeup party I was having.  Perhaps motherhood has calmed me some - or perhaps just put things in a different perspective.

I hate to admit this, but it's situations/events like this that teach me about our house.  You'd think I'd be proactive when it comes to understanding our home (as I'm fairly proactive in most other areas of my life), yet I tend to 'coast' when it comes to the maintenance of the home.  Shame on me.  I honestly didn't know where our sump pump was, or for that matter, what it looked like.  I'm sure if we had figured that our sooner, Mr. J and Cheruby wouldn't have been sucking and hauling water all day with the shop vac.

After finding my home inspection from when I purchased the home, we were in tune with where I sump pump was.  We took the lid off, suck out half the water, and VIOLA, the water drained and receded.  Unfortunately this was at about 10PM, after about 10 hours of hard labour.

Luckily not much was destroyed.  Our basement is undeveloped, and we use it mostly for storage and the cats.  So the area rug, and 'cat couch' (which I wanted to get rid of anyways) and a few boxes of Mr. J's precious comics, were the only things that were really ruined.

We had some guys by the house to check out the sump pump.  It seems to be working fine now, but we'll definitely keep a close eye on it from now on.

We investigated our home insurance, but decided not to put a claim in, as the damage isn't worth the deductible we'd have to pay.  Plus, we are enjoying a fairly substantial 'claim-free' discount on our home insurance.

I'm just glad that we started cleaning up the basement weeks ago, and de-cluttering, otherwise a lot more things would have been ruined.  Now just to find the motivation to keep going.