water, I thought you were my friend,

In a previous post, I mentioned my love or not, of laundry. I also think I may have mentioned, a storage room that my laundry is in. Well, that room was, as of 9:30 pm last night, covered in water about 2 in deep. It seems that the hose had just had enough of it! and decided to choose that evening to burst at the seams and spray water. I suppose it is good that I ran downstairs for just one more load(I almost didn't) before bed, or it could have been much worse. Worse on both my 'storage' and my water bill.
Here is the culprit:

And this is what the floor looked like when we were almost finished, and tired as all-get-out!

O.K. this picture looks much worse than it actually is.. a lot of that is just the concrete floor and all the stains on it. However, the floor drain is behind this white door on the right of this picture. It is clogged by some unknown substance that the previous owners attempted to discard, and so it drains r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y.... which made the task that much more fun.

Luckily a few teen boys were over and able to help out, and the kids jumped right in, thank god for well-mannered, helpful kids! And Shop-Vacs!

Here is a list of the highlights of the evening:
1. This is not our first rodeo- we have had floods like this approx. 3-4 times in this basement..for various reasons, some were our fault, most not. And they have all come at the most inconvenient time. Which leads me to....


2. This happened on my last load of laundry for the night, after spending most of my day really deep cleaning other areas of the house, finishing up my own laundry and starting on the kids. And just as I was getting settled in to watch one of my favorite television shows, Brothers and Sisters starring Sally Field.


3. We have a great large shop-vac that we purchased when we had the last flood... soon after which the puppy (who is now 3 yrs old) chewed the hose to pieces... thus, we had to beg borrow and ---well borrow two of them.


4. In order to turn off the house water (until further investigation revealed that it could simply be shut off at the washer) it required climbing to the back of a second storage room filled to the brim with old furniture and board games, and well, most anything the kids clean out of their own rooms... note: desperate need to downsize storage!



5. By the time the situation was assessed, and correct tools were searched out, 99% of the
'storage' was hauled to dry space, and kids were sent to the hardware store for replacement parts, ----said stores were closed.


It was not the way I wanted to spend my Sunday evening, my muscles are stiff and sore, from lifting heavy boxes in such a hurry, and I am just plain tired.

If there is a silver lining to this? I discovered (today on my lunch hour run) there are some hot construction men at Lowe's hardware, I just may need to start on my without-a-honey-do list sooner than I planned!

Tonight will be the night that I wash all the wet things, dry the other wet things, and pack all that storage back into its place.
Bonus #2- My laundry / food storage / Christmas decor storage / tool bench / camping storage room is now, sparkling clean...
Well, almost.