A Flooded Basement
It has been raining a lot here lately. A whole lot. I could probably count the number of days this month that it hasn’t rained on one hand. I guess the April showers showed up a month late this year.
I was in a tizzy because I couldn’t dry clothes without either taking them to the laundromat or someone else’s house, since Hubby still has yet to install a dryer outlet and hanging clothes out in the rain does no good. That wasn’t such a big deal after our water started giving us trouble. Not to be outdone, the rain had to find some other way to get to me. So on Friday, we got another massive storm, and we ended up with knee-deep water in the basement.
I was at home when it happened, but I was completely clueless. I had a terrible headache, so I lay down and dozed off and on for a couple of hours. Pumpkin was here too, but the thunder and lightning were scaring her so she lay down with me and was out in no time. I was none the wiser until the storm had been over for an hour or so, and Hubby came home and alerted me to the problem. He wouldn’t have known either, except that the water was so high it covered the steps that go under the porch and to the basement.
He called our insurance agent, but it would have done him just as much good to call a Pleasanton motorcycle accident attorney. Since we don’t have flood insurance, it doesn’t look like they’re going to cover anything. At least the agent took pity on us and brought over a pump to clear out the water. If it hadn’t been for that, we would probably still be dipping it out with buckets.
The standing water is gone, but there’s still a good bit of mud down there. The water/mud nearly pushed out one of the blocks in the wall, but it appears to be reparable. The pressure tank and washing machine are still operational, I can’t try out the dryer, and the water heater was already having problems before the flooding. We didn’t have much of anything else down there, and the few items that were there were mostly junk and not things that water would hurt. So I guess in a way, we were lucky.
Hubby dug out the trench that the previous owners had made to divert the water coming down off the hill around the house. We got plenty more rain over the weekend, and it appears to be working well. Now we just need to finish drying things out, check out the crawl space behind the basement and see what else we can do to prevent this from happening again and fix the basement wall. Not small tasks, but doable.
