The rains came down and the floods came up.....literally.

So, we had a lot of rain on Monday.  Like 4-6 inches in just a few hours.  Ben and I were sitting on the screened in porch before dinner enjoying the rain.  Natalie was playing super hero and wanted me to send her on missions.  So I told her to go check the basement for water.  She came back and told us all was clear.  I sent her to do a few other little tasks.  Then she comes out and says, "Mom, there's water in the living room from the rain."  I was thinking, "Yeah, right."  but she insisted that I come and look.  She pointed to a puddle on the carpet and I thought someone must have spilled some water but then we looked up and saw water dripping from the ceiling.  YOWZERS!!!!

It was only drip drip dripping and not gush gush gushing.  It slowed down and stopped when the rain slowed down and stopped.  We put a bucket under the drip and probably collected about 2 cups or so overnight so it really wasn't bad.  We had someone come the next day and fix a crack in the roof around one of the pipes.

Ben poked around in the attic while we girls ran around in a panic.  Little did we know it was the least of our concerns with water that night.

Later that night around 10:00 Katie went downstairs to go to bed.  She got to the bottom of the stairs and I heard, "Moooooooooooom!!!!!!"  There was standing water at the bottom of the stairs and in the bathroom.  Pictures don't really show it well but basically the entire basement was flooded.  All the carpet in all the rooms was sopping wet and the cement floor in the storage room was covered in water.  Our sump pump drain pipe had gotten clogged with mud and our back up sump pump had not kicked in.  Normally, it would sound an alarm so we would know something was up.  Ben quickly ran a hose into the bathtub from the sump pump well to keep anymore water from coming in.  The bathtub quickly filled but did not overflow.  There was sooooo much water!  Katie and I looked around helplessly not sure where to start.  We got some garbage bags and started bagging up wet books and papers etc.

We took some of the smaller furniture upstairs to get it off the wet carpet.  The rest of the heavy stuff we set on blocks of wood until we could move it the next day.

We stacked up what we could to get things off the wet carpet.

The cleaners came the next day and sucked up 400 gallons of water and the carpet was still wet.  They've had fans blowing on it for almost a week and it's pretty much dried out.  I did not think they would be able to salvage the carpet but they did.  We got the storage room floor dried off and moved all the furniture in there.  In a way, it will be nice to have a fresh start and put things back in and orderly fashion.  The toy room has a way of getting out of control.  We went 10 years in this house without a drop in the basement.  Guess it was our turn....now we can feel like true Iowans!