The Rains Came Down and the Floods Came Up

I always blog about the happy, eventful things going on in our life, but since I use this as our family journal I figured I had better blog about a not so happy, eventful thing that happened this week. On Tuesday afternoon I had just put Claire down for a nap and I was doing some sewing while I was watching The West Wing. Sidenote: The West Wing is my new Netflix series and I am totally hooked. I love it. Anyway, while I was sewing I could really hear the rain coming down. I walked over to my kitchen window, opened it, and looked outside into the stairwell. I thought to myself, "Wow it is seriously coming down out there. That's a lot of rain!" I went back into my living room, turned on my show, and started working on my sewing again. After several minutes I noticed the rain suddenly seemed much louder.  I thought maybe I had accidentally left the window open.  I went into the kitchen and saw water pouring in around the door.  I ran to the window and flung it open.  I looked outside and saw that our entire stairwell was filled with a few feet of water, and it was all pouring into our house.  

I quickly called Bryce and told him to come home from work as fast as he could.  Bryce's parents own the house we live in, we rent it from them, so next I called my mother-in-law and she said she would get there as quickly as she could.  Then I frantically started picking everything up off the floor.  I didn't know how deep it was going to get so I gathered up our most expensive items and took them upstairs.  My sister-in-law & brother-in-law live in the upstairs apartment.  My sister-in-law took Claire and let me start hauling up as much stuff as I could to her apartment.  

One of Bryce's brothers got to our house first.  We live at the bottom of a pretty steep hill and it just happened to be garbage day.  When Bryce's brother arrived he saw that a garbage can across the street was creating a dam and blocking all the water from continuing down the gutter.  The garbage can was instead diverting all of the water into our driveway, and straight into our stairwell.  He moved the garbage can to stop the water and then came inside to help.  Bryce and his other brother arrived soon after and everyone got to work.  Luckily the water never got very deep in our house it just soaked into the all the carpet throughout the house.  The only thing of ours that got ruined was our electric bathroom scale.  I was more than grateful we only had a $15 loss.  We had to rip up all of the carpet and use shopvacs to suck out all the water.  After all of the carpet was removed we disinfected the entire house, and mopped all of the floors to try to remove all of the germs carried in with the water from the street.

I got our house back in a little bit of order, and we just have to live with cement floors for a few days until the carpet gets replaced.  We are so grateful the only thing that was ruined was the carpet...and our bathroom scale ;).  The flooding could have been much worse and we feel like we got off really lucky.
Here are a few pictures of the aftermath of the flood.  You can see the line on the wall that shows how deep the water was out in the stairwell.I'm a bit of a neat freak, so to say this has been a little bit of a challenge for me is an understatement.   I keep reminding myself that all of this is only temporary, and it seems to keep me hanging in there.  Maybe this means our family will get a streak of good luck after all of this...I can only hope!