Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Rained out.

This was an exciting week around the McG house....we got a lot of the house painted (it isn't all white!) and we got a patio poured out back (bye, bye weeds). Unfortunately all the excitement was quickly overshadowed; so I'm just going to cut to the chase. Saturday night the painters has just finished after 3 days, and John was up in Breck for Todd's (my soon to be, brother-in-law) bachelor party. Lovely right?! Well, not if you are at home and you discover that you basement is flooding. Yep, that was me. 

My sister came over to drop off a few things in the midst of a horrible storm. It was POURING. She had Eddie (her dog) with her who does not get along with Boom-man my ahole puddy-cat; so I ran downstairs to lock up Boom in the basement when they arrived. Much to my surprise I stepped on a wet stair. WTF?! At first I thought that Boom had peed or something, but then quickly realized that it was way worse than that. There was literally over an inch of water and mud, that's right...mud... in my basement. 

This isn't supposed to happen, it's a new house, right? Wrong. Apparently when you screw with mother nature's path she isn't happy and will find her way to mess your ____ up. During the storm, our basement window-well apparently filled up with water and mud (all of it was funneling between our yard and the neighbors into our window well). Eventually this created a "sink-hole" of sorts and everything plummeted down our window well until the window finally gave way and pulled from the foundation. 

So here's the scene.... 

that is a layer of MUD


It ripped the insulation off the wall,
and you can see where the window pulled off the foundation in the left corner. Ugh.

Sad Window

Won't be using that suitcase anymore.

That lovely wool Banana Republic coat is now in the trash.

Sister, Em wading her way through

My first move after discovering this tragic news was to call John. Not a good idea when he's at a bachelor party in the mountains and didn't drive up there.  So the evening then turned to me and my sister carrying boxes up the stairs for like 2 hours. She is a gem. She has actually moved into a new house that day herself (also without Todd's help because she wanted his bachelor party to carry on).  I also called our builders emergency hotline since the window "gave-way." They outsource after-hours calls to a 3rd party company who was very backed up with work from people all over the place... I guess a lot of people had their basements flood. Long story short they committed to coming to deal with the issue on Sunday morning. By this time John was home, thankfully. And the "clean-up crew" has been hard at work ever since. Fans have been blowing to the point that our house has a vibration in an attempt to dry it all up. They were back out today to try to scrape the mud up, and tomorrow they are planning to power wash it.  Mud has been tracked through my entire house and it's still a total mess. 

Here's our garage until then....
Filled with crap.

The builder is fixing everything including replacing the carpet down to the basement. Despite that, if you talked to me on Sunday I was in the worst mood ever (don't get me started), and I'm now at a point where I'm irritated but have decided that if nothing else this is forcing us to get super organized in the basement once it is cleaned out. I'm picturing industrial shelving with perfectly labeled rubber bins. Namaste. Thankfully, I don't think we lost anything super important or irreplaceable, so that's the silver lining. 

I hope to post next about really exciting things like paint and patios. Happier times to come...