Flooding.

So, everyone that lives around here knows that it's been raining a lot lately.  On Thursday night we had our small group (and all the kids) over here for a cook-out, which turned into a cook-in due to heavy thunderstorms.  We just moved everything inside, and moved all the big kid toys to the basement so they'd still be able to have room to play.  Everything was great and the kids had fun, as did the rest of us.  By 9pm everyone had gone home and we started cleaning up.  I went to the basement to start picking up some toys, but Ryan said to go ahead and leave them set up down there because if it was supposed to keep raining for a few days, we'd want a place to let Kylan run around and play.  So I come back upstairs and started cleaning up here.  Just a few minutes later as I was loading the dishwasher, I thought I'd check back down in the basement to make sure no one had left any cups or plates down there.  As I walk down the steps, I see that almost a fourth of the basement is already covered in sewer water that is coming up through one of the drains.  It was coming up so quickly that we had to immediately start moving things upstairs.  With the help of my parents, Nate and Trish, Steve Barnes, Jess Crawford, and Matt Baker we got almost everything out of the basement (including  all the music equipment/guitars/drumset/amps/etc, all the toys that were set up, a mattress, bunk beds, a new set of baby furniture that Nate and Trisha had just bought and were storing down there, all Kylan's old baby clothes/gear/toys/etc and also new stuff we already have for the future, and MUCH more).  It was at least 2 hours of work getting everything moved up and out of harms way, and then another 2-3 hours of Ryan and I trying to "organize" all stuff that was now just thrown into our laundry room, kitchen, living room, dining room office and garage.  All in all there was about 5 inches of sewer water that sat in our basement before it started to go down later in the night.  As you might imagine, even after it all went back down, it left quite a stench.  Friday was spent cloroxing the entire basement with a mop- twice- and then cloroxing the laundry room and kitchen floors as well since that was where we carried everything through.  Not to mention that we had a garage sale here all day Friday that we were running as well.

So we've had a bit of an eventful last couple of days.  Right now we're still letting the cloroxed floor downstairs dry a little more with a dehumidifier before we take on the task of moving everything back down at some point.  In the meantime, my dad and Ryan have spent some time trying come up with ways to prevent this from happening again.  This is a new house (just a year old) and this shouldn't be happening.  We've had a couple problems with water when it rains heavily.  For awhile our toilets became bubbling geysers with heavy rain making them unusable for as long as it was raining, for the most part.  Later we found out the builders had never taken off a cap from a pipe, making that happen.  Another time, we had water coming up from 2 different drains in the basement (only putting about an inch of water over less than half the basement) and we called the city water department to ask why and they said that also could have something to do with the builder.  Now this.  The city came out again and all the guy could say was "This shouldn't be happening".  He said there may be a problem with the water lines and such that led to our house and the city will have to dig up our front yard to do some work- which we would have to pay for.  So now we're talking to our insurance and our builder hoping that between the two, we can get it taken care of.

Can't complain though- I've been seeing all the families on the news in the midwest whose houses are floating down the flooding river or have been destroyed by tornadoes.  Both of which are more than I can even imagine enduring.