When it rains, it pours....

When it rains.....it pours...and then our basement turns into a swimming pool! Last night it rained hard all night long. At 5:00am Chris woke up and went to check on things outside to make sure the gutters and down spouts were still clear (they had been blocked earlier in the evening). He came back to bed and I asked him if he had checked the basement. He said no...and went off to check. He walked down the steps in the dark because Jacob was sleeping in the basement and he didn't want to turn on a light and wake him. As he stepped off the last step, he stepped into 6 inches of cold water!! Luckily, Jacob didn't wake up in the middle of the night...and the water hadn't gotten high enough to bother him on the couch. So, at 5:00am we were up trying to clean, get things up out of the water, and figure out what the problem was. Luckily 2 neighbors came to our rescue and brought over portable sump pumps so we could begin pumping out water. Another neighbor came to help us carry things up out of our basement and start bailing water.

As of right now (10:45am) we have most of the water out of the basement. A plumber just came to install a new sump pump, so hopefully we'll be okay now. Half our belongings are in the garage and the other half are up on whatever we could find to get them out of the water. We've already talked to insurance and someone is coming in 4 hours to start extracting the water. Our house is a disaster and is starting to smell. The sad thing is that it's not even the first official day of school (it was a teacher day today) and we already had to use a personal day.We'll see what can be saved and what is trash. The carpet is soaked and was actually floating off the floor in most places. I'm sure our treadmill is ruined. Jacob's playstation was floating in 6 inches of water, so I would bet that it's done. A lot of my scrapbooking supplies (mostly paper and all my idea books/magazines) were also destroyed.

I'm off to start doing laundry (I had boxes of garage sale clothes and hand me downs in cardboard boxes in the basement) and then do some more cleaning.Below are photos of what it looked like this morning. Notice the time on the clock in the first photo! Nothing like starting your day with 6 inches of water in your basement!!
I get made fun of a lot because I am SO organized! I keep most of my kids' toys in plastic bins...and it paid off! Although things were damp, most of the toys were okay. There were some stray Barbies and lincoln logs floating around though!
Our entertainment system...luckily most of it was up high enough that it was okay. Jacob's playstation wasn't so lucky...it was floating in the water in front of here.

A lot of the plastic storage bins were floating in the water!!

The culprits....2 sump pumps...neither one working!
Chris' tools....notice the submerged shop-vac? It actually worked when we tried it out later.
My scrapbook area. I think the floating area rug is a nice touch. I actually had things on the bottom shelves of both units, but they are ruined.
Lego men floating across the basement floor....Jacob had been playing legos yesterday, so we found legos floating everywhere!

Shortly after I took this photo I came back to this spot and discovered cans of pop floating around! The boxes were so soggy that the cans of pop had broken loose!

Proof that I'm not exaggerating....this was taken after we had started pumping out some of the water.