H20 Basement

I walked down into the basement and felt a "squish" combined with a "splash" followed by a pit in my stomach. My sump pump had gotten stuck and flooded the basement. For the first half hour I was angry at myself as I'd talked last week about replacing my sump pump. After canceling all my meetings, I started trying to figure out what to do. Cathie and I updated our facebook status to let people know what was going on and what we needed and then I opened up the phonebook. The first company I called was Johnny on the Spot carpet cleaning who gave me a range of $800-$3000 to get the water out of my basement. For that price, I think it should have included a massage and dinner. I called around until I found someone who would do the water extraction for $300 and we set about clearing out our basement. Meanwhile, our facebook statuses were noticed by neighbors and Alex was kind enough to bring Paul's de-humidifier over.

We cleared out everything from the basement, which was a lot of crap. My Dad called and offered to help followed by our Pastor Joe Muzzi coming over along with Jen Niemi. Dad, Joe, Cathie and I got a lot of the stuff out of the basement and then Jen and Cathie focused on getting rid of some of the junk. My office was a job that I had to deal with on my own. I have hundreds of cables and power cords a slew of computers and other crap down there. I had to face my demons by myself, because I was the only one who knew what I needed to do and where things went. I then went and rented a giant commercial de-humidifier while the guys suctioned out the water and set fans around the room under the carpet to dry things out.

At some point, I came to grips with the fact that it could have been a lot worse. My house didn't burn down like the Raitz's, we didn't really lose much stuff, I was home to deal with it, no one has cancer, we have friends who gathered around us to help us out.