One Week Later

It's been one week since we woke up to three inches of water in our basement and it sure seems like it's been a lot longer than that. Much has happened since the events of last Tuesday - some good, some not-so-good. Life seems to go on, but sometimes you just want the world to stop until you can catch up with it. (Like you ever would anyway.)

This is the same room as this.

As far as the mess in the basement is concerned, the family room is stuffed full at present with three rooms worth of stuff. At least we got that room cleaned up. We had taken the carpeting up, as well as the padding, and cleaned it and let it bake in the sun. Before putting it back down on the cement floor, we scrubbed the floor with Lysol, then sprayed the padding and the back side of the carpeting with Lysol spray. Just getting this room cleaned up went a long way in getting rid of the awful smell of things.

Next move was to shampoo the game room carpeting, which is glued to the floor. It's a type of indoor/outdoor carpeting, so it lends itself pretty well to being wet and being able to be cleaned fairly easily. We have not gotten to that yet, however, because we discovered that the middle room's carpet was emitting an odor that needed to be dealt with.

We thought it was put down directly over the existing padded vinyl flooring that came with the house when we bought it, but when I was down on the floor vacuuming around the edges, I noticed the bad smell. So Romie pulled it back and we saw the carpeting used as a pad under this small piece of carpeting. It was then that we remembered that we'd used Grandma's kitchen carpeting from her condo, which was pretty new, that she had taken up when she put in wood flooring. It was now sopping wet. All of that had to be taken up and cleaned and dried. More washing with Lysol and more spraying.

So now we're ready to move on to the game room, which we will likely do in the next couple of days. During all this, we have had my cousin Jody, from Texas, and her husband Jesse staying at our house. It has been quite awhile since we've seen them, and while Grandma offered to put them up at the Holiday Inn, we insisted they still stay with us. They'd dealt with Hurricane Rita and fully understood what we were going through. Besides, we hadn't had flooding on the two main floors of the house!



On Sunday, Grandma had taken us all out for dinner at CJ's HighMarks, a restaurant at Fox's Den Golf Course in Celina (yum!). After returning to Van Wert, the guys went golfing and the rest of us piled into Mom's car and headed to Ft. Wayne to see Jenna's apartment. Dad had just finished making bedroom furniture for her and we wanted to see it in her room there. It was also the first time Grandma had seen the apartment.





Her fiance Joe was there, too, which was nice, because he's a pretty busy guy working at Best Buy and going to school at IPFW. He gave Mom lessons on how to work her new digital camera.




After getting home from a very full day, we made a fire in the firepit, fully intending to roast hot dogs, but we couldn't find a single one in the refrigerator or freezer, so we made pizza rolls and other things and ate those while sitting around the fire.


It was a perfect night for star-gazing and staring at the nearly full moon. Out there, it was easy to forget the mess inside the house. Just what we needed. :-)