Last week we had our hardwoods done upstairs. We moved everything out of the living room, family room, office, and stairway into the garage, kitchen, and basement. In the basement we set up a makeshift living room and office so we could actually live and get some work done (especially important as my in-laws, where we slept) has no wi-fi). After the floors were done, it rained all week so we were not able to begin work on painting the rooms as we had planned. We needed to wait while the smell of polyurethane stopped giving us massive headaches and chased us out of the house.

After 10 days of light to moderate rain, all hell broke loose. The final night of rain, last Friday night, we got 7 inches of rain in less than 12 hours. After a week of rain, the ground was completely saturated and something had to give.

At 9:30PM Friday, I checked the basement and saw that it was dry. But a voice in my head had me worried and as a precaution, i grabbed the two most valuable pieces of art we had, a drawing of sunflowers by Ann and a painting of flowers by my sister Jen, and put them up on the couch.

When I returned the next morning, there was 5″ of rain in the basement.

I could go into lurid detail about the next three days and the cleanup but after Katrina and after what happened to some people in New England with that same rain, it would be more whining than anything else. We lost a lot of stuff but we came out of this far better off than a lot of people so we’re thankful for that. In the end, aside from some old books, linens, games, pillows, a tv, a computer monitor, and various and sundry other random objects, we came out of this just fine.

But it wasn’t a lot of fun and I certainly don’t recommend the experience to anyone. And if you keep stuff in your basement, for goodness sakes, put it in plastic or get it up off the floor. You never know!

You can see more pictures of our basement in this flickr set.

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