Our First Flood

And hopefully our last...

About a week and a half ago our basement flooded. It was definitely our fault, but it still sucks.

We have a sprinkler system. The system started dying back in August. We had a hose break. Half of the caps broke off the system. Just an old system.

Then it came time to winterize. Dylan called about 7 different yard people to have them come aerate, fertilize, and blow out our sprinkler system. We had only one person call him back and they played telephone tag a couple times and eventually never called back. So we never got the system blown out. I very carefully laid this responsibility in Dylan's hands. He knew he was and is in charge of the yard. But I guess we/he kind of figured since half of it was broken anyways, not too big a deal.

And we probably would have been alright if we knew about the sprinkler shut off valve that is located next to the main water shut off. Dylan said once the flood happened he remembered hearing about it, but I really don't.

What happened is that with all the freezing and slight unfreezing, one of the caps broke on the system and started flooding water into the window well in the basement. When Dylan got home from work, one of the neighbors was just getting home too and mentioned that it sounded like water was running around our house. Dylan went downstairs and the whole window well was full and water was coming in the bottom sides of the window. He told me there was about an inch of water on the floor.

The water came in through a hole built into the concrete sides of the window well and the speed made everything foamy and dirt piled up in the window well.

Still some water stuck in the window panes

I, of course, was working a ton this week and didn't even have a chance to call him back until he had already taken care of most of it and I said I was still going to be two more hours and that it was probably better I wasn't there anyways since I would probably stress out.

In the end we got the water vacuumed up in the kitchen room with the tile and got a lot of water out of the carpet in my office. After a couple days of trying to dry it out (with a fan, not open windows since it was freezing this whole time), it was starting to really smell and just wasn't drying. We decided we would need to get rid of the carpet. The issue was that it smelled before. Our previous owner must have let an animal pee on the carpet down there since even with the maximum strength Febreeze, I would have to spray it every other day.

We have decided to go with the vinyl/laminate flooring. It is water proof, not to difficult to install, not too expensive and looks nice.

First we went to Home Depot to check out the flooring and get some details on it. We also wanted to asked what we needed to do to get the floor ready for the new flooring.

I love Home Depot! They are always so nice and helpful and ready to answer any of your questions. We have decided on one that comes in "full pieces" meaning that each piece you lay down looks like one cut of wood rather than like 3 cuts and then when you line that up it doesn't really match. Ours will also have the padding built in, so we have one less step to do.

Each piece of "wood" above is a separate slat

We decided to wait a little bit on putting the floor down, but we did have to pull up the carpet ASAP.

We moved the office into the kitchen and then Dylan pulled up the carpet tacking and got most of the glue off the floor.

We will still have to get a little more glue off, fill in the gaps from where the nails for the carpet tacking were in the cement and remove the baseboards (since they will end up too high once the new floor goes in).

Here is the floor sample we liked with the baseboards. Not too shabby!

Ultimate timing will probably either be around Christmas or maybe in like February. We don't especially need it at the moment, and it is an unexpected cash flow during Christmas, so my guess it that we will wait for a bit.

Our first home disaster turns into our first home improvement project! I am very excited to have the waterproof flooring since it is in the basement and since it will be our craft room and that will make it a lot easier to deal with paint, glue and glitter.