17 June 2008

"Life has a funny way...






of sneaking up on you when you think everything's okay and everything's going right..."

That Alanis song always reminds me of college and driving around in Shannon's Nissan Sentra ("The Silver Bullet") or my red and black Pontiac LeMans ("The Ladybug"), although now as an English teacher I need to dislike it because most of the "Ironic" things she mentions aren't actually ironic, but...the lyric fits my latest situation perfectly.


Just when I got on such a roll blogging about my tranquil domestic life and how much I was loving being home for summer, catastrophe struck Friday. We had torrential rains here in Springfield (as much as 5" in a matter of hours) and our basement flooded and completely turned our household upside down. We have window wells on the outside that filled and couldn't drain fast enough and the water came in mainly through one window and just filled our carpet with so much water it actually splashed up when we walked across it and spread to all the rooms. Some friends helped us pull out all the furniture and everything else down in the basement (from a large family room, media room, two bedrooms and several cluttered closets--embarrassing!) and take it upstairs and then a cleaning company came and pulled out all the carpet and padding for us that night. We've had their fans and giant dehumidifier going ever since. Luckily, their equipment has worked and we're moving ahead with re-flooring. The carpet could have been saved, but we never really liked it anyway and didn't like the thought of dampness in any form, so we're going to continue the multi-colored slate tile that is in the bathroom and wet bar area and put that throughout the entire space. We wanted to do the stained concrete but couldn't get enough of the imperfections from construction buffed out (paint and joint compound spots, nail holes from the carpet's tack strips), so after much indecision, we are going with the tile and feel good about it. I took some pictures of the disaster while we were in the pointless Shop Vac phase and later after everything had been cleared out and piled upstairs, where it would sit for almost two weeks. Can't wait to get back to regular blogging, but it might be a while before life settles down enough for me to. Life really does throw you curves, and I did not see this one coming.

2 comments:

April said...

Wow!! That definitely was a buttbuster, huh? I am happy to read that you were able to salvage most everything but the carpet. I don't want carpet down in our basement either. I am dying to stain the concrete, but like you, I don't know how much work we'll have to do to get it to that point. I'll try to email you later today with my new address. Talk to you soon!

Anonymous said...

Just stopped by and I'm wondering how the basement re-flooring is going? It was SO good to see you guys over the weekend, I just wish we could've spent more time chatting with you. Getting married is really busy! I have a new blog address, by the way. Here it is:

http://curtisandalysiabutrick.blogspot.com/

Talk to you later!

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