Flooded basement

On Friday since it was raining (again!), I decided to bring Oliver home instead of hanging out with him in Williamsport while the other two were at history camp since we had already been to the Castle Playland, gone shopping, gone bowling, etc. the other days and playgrounds weren't an option in the rain. I let him watch a DVD he had picked out at the library that Nadia was not interested in seeing, and I did a variety of things - cooked stuffed shells, did some cleaning, packed our suitcase, wrapped his birthday presents, etc. After I picked them up at noon, we had breakfast sandwiches for lunch at Dunkin Donuts and then went to an art studio called Centered Earth where you can make pottery. I had signed the kids up for a two hour Popcorn Party art class. Since Nadia really, really had wanted to do an art camp this summer (and that didn't happen), I figured I should schedule at least one art class in somewhere. Some of the classes involve actually starting with wet clay. In this one the kids were each given a piece of bisque to paint with a glaze. They were making popcorn bowls. Nadia and Oliver picked a bowl that was in the shape of a football. Ian picked one that looked like a popcorn container you might get at a circus or movie theater. Nadia painted her football a variety of shades of blue (her favorite color), and Oliver's football bowl is green on the inside and yellow on the outside with orange sprinkles in the yellow glaze. Ian painted his green and black. They will be fired and we can pick them up later this week. The kids did two coats of glaze and then she took them for an ice cream treat before they did the final coat.

We had dinner and were home for a couple of hours before Paul came home. I gave him a haircut and then my friend, Cheri, arrived. Nadia, Oliver, Cheri, and I headed to church for the Big Daddy Weave concert. Uncle Al and Aunt Millie met us there. Originally I hadn't purchased a ticket for Oliver, but he begged and begged me to buy him one, and since it was almost his birthday, I bought him one at the last minute. That was a mistake! He just conks out too early to pay money for him to attend a concert that starts at 7pm. We had toyed with getting him tickets to the Newsboys for his birthday give, and I am SO glad we didn't do that. It turns into a very expensive nap for him! When we got home we walked in the door and discovered that Paul and Ian had just gotten home a few minutes before us. They had made an unplanned trip to Lowe's to buy a sump pump. Shortly after we had left Paul heard the alarm which meant the main pump wasn't working and the back-up pump was on. He cleaned up a little bit of water in the basement and then the battery on the back-up pump died. We had gotten a LOT of rain on Friday, and it was too much for the back-up pump to handle. So when I walked in I ran down and was trying to get stuff up out of the basement because there was 5 inches of water across the entire basement. Paul told me I would regret it later when he saw me carrying a filing cabinet up the stairs, heavy boxes with water logged books, etc., but at the moment I wasn't thinking about my back but just trying to salvage as much as I could. 

Around 11pm Nadia and I went to bed. She was a trooper with helping us, especially considering the water was extremely cold. I got up a bit later to email the woman in Pittsburgh that we had made arrangements to stay at her place on Saturday through Airbnb. I didn't expect a refund given how late we were canceling our reservation, but I found out the next morning that she was very gracious and gave us back everything she could (all we ended up losing was the Airbnb fee). We had planned to attend the reenactment of the 1763 battle at Bushy Run Battlefield, go miniature golfing, and attend another living history program at Fort Pitt on Saturday. On Sunday we had planned to visit the Carnegie Science Museum and Pittsburgh Children's Museum that we had last visited with my dad in December 2016. All of that got scratched off the calendar, and instead Paul and I worked pretty much nonstop for two days putting the house back in order. We were throwing things into the garage that had been ruined, drying off what we could, finding new places to put things since many cardboard boxes were ruined, etc. Thankfully it was sunny out all weekend so we kept taking things outside and used the sun to dry many things. I also ran very unusual loads of laundry - one was full of soccer socks and Christmas things (tree skirt, Santa hats, hotpads, etc.). 

While the kids and I were at church yesterday morning, Paul drove down to his parents' house to bring back a dehumidifier and his dad's pick-up truck. We learned that our dehumidifier was also broken and none of the Home Depot, Lowes, or Walmart stores within a 40 minute drive of our place had any in stock (many people have had flooding around here over the past two weeks). So we ordered one on Amazon that is supposed to arrive on Wednesday, but we are using Paul's parents' until our new one arrives. His dad's truck was stuck in mud so he got home a lot later than planned. He loaded up the truck with all our ruined stuff and drove it to work today. I kept cleaning and reorganizing until the house started coming back together. I found other places in the house to move many things so that we are keeping less stuff in the basement. It had been several years since it flooded. We can't recall exactly when, but Paul thinks it was about 2011. The biggest unknown right now is the elliptical. It was not plugged in or turned on while the basement was flooded, but we still don't know if the water damaged it or not. I really hope not as that was an expensive piece of equipment, and we have only owned it for 12 months. 

This weekend definitely didn't go as planned. Had I known we were going to spend over $400 for a

sump pump plus dehumidifier, I wouldn't have recently ordered carpet for Ian's bedroom. Hopefully we can spend less on the house next year. This year we got a new washing machine, new dryer, and sealed the driveway before these basement and carpet purchases. We did save a little money by not going to Pittsburgh for the weekend. Although it was very overwhelming for me emotionally to see a mess everywhere I turned in the house and also sad to see some things we wanted to keep thrown out, it is now back in order, and there were some pluses to the calamity. First of all, some of the stuff we discarded we didn't truly need. I do like purging, although I'm hoping the basement never floods again!!! For six years I had been asking Paul to go through some papers from when he was in college. He went through some of them last year. Some of them were water logged and just automatically were dumped, but he did take the time to go through the ones that were still dry to figure out what to put in the filing cabinet and what to put in the recycling bin. He chose the recycling bin for most of the papers, which means we have less paper clutter in the house now. The same was true for some of his books. Many of his boxes of books were up higher on the shelving and were not affected by the flood thankfully. But a couple of his book boxes were on the bottom shelf. Again some books were ruined and he again went through the dry books and didn't automatically keep all of them. I was surprised as usually he wants to keep all his books. He even took some from the bookshelves in the living room and added them to the recycling bin pile. Since he had his Dad's truck he was also able to take some tree branches he had pruned a month ago and also a couple of posts from the deck he had removed earlier this summer. I also added a wooden puppet theater to the pile. It wasn't damaged in the flood, but it had been broken for five years so I figured it was time to just get rid of it and have one less thing on the to do list. I'm also glad that if the basement was going to flood that it happened on Friday night instead of Saturday morning after we had left for Pittsburgh. We could have come back to a couple of feet of water rather than five inches and many more things would have been ruined had that happened. 

A perk of not going away this weekend was Nadia was able to attend an event for girls in grades 4-8 at the Methodist church near our home. They have a youth group for grades 4-8 called the Middle that usually meets on Sunday night. We learned about it at VBS this summer. The previous Sunday we showed up only to find out they had a pool party earlier in the day. Now we're on the text list for the group. This past weekend they met on Saturday night instead of Sunday night. The boys went to a baseball game, and the girls had a pampering night- manicures, pedicures, facials, strawberries dipped in chocolate fondue, etc. There were about 12 girls there, and Nadia already knew at least 8 of them already - one from AWANA, three from our church, another from a soccer team in the past, etc. It seems no matter where we go Nadia usually already knows at least one person there. The boys went to a Good News Camp less than 10 minutes from our house today (9-2:30). Ian and Oliver knew three of the kids in the camp (one from the other Camp Good News and two of our neighbors who also go to our church). Nadia had her first day of theater camp today. It's a two week camp (12-3pm) for 4th and 5th graders. They will put on a performance of a short musical next Friday afternoon. She knew one girl in the theater camp from girls camp at Camp Susque two weeks ago.