A Deluge I Tell Ya!

We got a bit of rain yesterday afternoon, geesh -

The skies opened and it poured! Kinda came out of nowhere too.

However, as you can see, the water is draining off Pritchard and running down our easement in a torrent! 

There used to be a trench that ran parallel along the right side of the easement but it’s long gone. We’ll be mulling this issue over and giving some serious thought to having a new trench dug to manage and control all this water, when it come and to minimize the erosion.

The Great Flood of October 1, 2011

So, we've had some excitement, water excitement actually, back on October 1! Our washing machine decided to go-on-the-fritz, and by this I mean that the machine never stopped filling with water, OH NO! Naturally, the machine only holds so much water, so the rest came out and came out and came out and came out...

What alerted us to this catastrophe was the basement smoke detector started going off. When JoAnne went down to investigate (I wasn't going down there) she was greeted with water pouring from dozens upon dozens of ceiling nooks and crannies. The water was running through and out of the smoke detector, which thankful set it off and alerted us to the problem.

We, along with help from our neighbor, eventually cleaned everything up that night. Now, when I called our insurance company to open a claim another type of flood began. They immediately dispatched a cleaning and restoration company called ServiceMASTER.

and boy oh boy did they arrive -


In the basement they removed ALL the ceiling insulation in half the basement; the half under the kitchen and bathroom. The also remove the top half of the sheetrock on the outside back wall and the insulation behind it. Three locations had already begun growing mold, which they sprayed and treated. Then came in the industrial equipment: (4) blowers and (2) dehumidifiers. These ran full time from Friday afternoon till Sunday morning, see below -


The kitchen and bathroom had the baseboard trim removed and 1" holes drilled into the walls to allow air flow. The refrigerator was pulled out and the same was done behind it. Then (5) industrial fans and (1) hugh dehumidifier was installed, and again ran from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. The noise was deafening. You literally couldn't hear yourself think, see below -


The good news is that we're 100% dry, so there's not worry about mold. The bad news is that the basement ceiling and walls need new insulation installed and the sheetrock re-hung. The weather is changing fast and getting colder as each day passes, so the timing isn't the best.

We're in a holding pattern until we hear back from our insurance assessor but all in all things moved pretty fast.