Monday Blues

Here is a quick update before I go back to doing some work. Casey and I got into Laramie on the night of the 10th. Did some work on the house and met with a Realtor on Friday to talk about listing our house for sale. Saturday we decided we wanted to put it on the market asap since it was pretty much ready to go. Sunday we continued to do some last minute work before the Realtor came by Monday to take pictures. Monday, I did some last minute cleaning, the Realtor came by, took pictures and said that the house would be listed that day. Now, get ready for this super exciting and super ironic part of my story: the river a couple blocks away was rising pretty fast, and had been for the past couple of days, as was the ground water here at our house. While the realtor was taking pictures Casey decided that it was probably time to start moving Bj and Tersa's stuff out of the basement, just in case we had to tear up carpet due to flooding, as we could see the ground water seeping out of our french drain. So a bunch of people came over to help us move their stuff out of the basement, and then we just watched and waited for a little while, hoping that we wouldn't have to tear out all the carpet, padding and baseboard. However, as luck would have it, the ground water kept rising higher and faster, so we eventually had to pull it all out. About 30 minutes later the water started seeping through the cracks on the floor, and then it started seeping in from the side of the walls, and needless to say it's been a very, very long week, and so far and it doesn't look like we'll be selling our house for a little while. The most ironic part, there haven't been water levels this high since the late 1950's. This house has been sitting here for 20 years with no water damage in the basement that we know of, until the DAY we go to put it on the market.

To try to look on the bright side, it hasn't rained since Sunday, and hopefully it doesn't for a while. And, nothing of Bj and Tersa's was ruined, and we were able to save our carpet. The water has stopped seeping into the basement (thank goodness!), and Casey and I were able to rig up a sweet irrigation system, with a water pump and gutters yesterday to prevent further water coming in from our drain. So far, we have had to cut out a couple of inches of drywall were the water had soaked in, but fortunately that's the extent of the damage at the moment, we'll see what else pops up in the next little while. There were some other awesome things that went wrong Monday, but it's really not worth my time to list them, we are just super grateful to the people that helped us move stuff out of the basement, as well as the GREAT friends that stayed until close to midnight trying to help us keep the water in the basement to a minimum, so with this, Casey and I say thank you to all that helped us. Here's some pictures for thought:

BEFORE

DURING AND AFTER

Our pump and irrigation system

Luckily we had our sump pump to push water into, as well as our water heater drain to keep water levels down fairly low during the night.