Water, Water Everywhere...

That was the theme this weekend at the McKie home. Everywhere we turned water was dripping, gushing, sloshing, and just plain being annoying!

Rusty came home from work on Friday afternoon and went down to check on our basement. It had been raining almost every day last week and Friday was no exception. In fact, Friday was the hardest rain I had seen in Louisville yet. So, down to the basement he went...only to find water "gushing" (his words) out of the walls. When I came home, I found a very sad husband in the basement trying to control the water. There was no way to block the water from coming in. So, we started getting the boxes with books, pictures and photos off the floor. We left the boxes with dishes and vases to get wet...we would deal with those later.

Here's what our basement looked like after we rearranged boxes and unpacked some of them. What a mess!!! There were several areas of huge puddles (an inch deep in some places), so we moved things away from them and into the middle of the room.

After working all day on Saturday and most of the day Sunday, Here is our semi-organized basement. We didn't unpack all of the boxes...we saved some of the boxes labeled misc. and jam-packed full of random items for our later pleasure. Please take note of all the amazing vases/glassware that we have. I really enjoy them! Now, if only we could find a place upstairs for them....

Here is our collection of books. We are a reading family! These are also just the books that were still packed up. We have quite a few in the bookcases upstairs. Our goal is to go through them and sell some of them on half.com. We have quite a few books from our college years that neither of us want to see again. After we organized things, it was time to start the cleaning process. We borrowed a wet vac from a friend in our Community Group and last night we went to work cleaning up the mud and left over water (our de-humidifier was working double time this weekend). We got it clean-ish. Still a little dirty (dried mud, not wet, thank you very much) in some places, but it is definitely better! The first thing on Rusty's summer to-do list is to build up a sand barrier around our house so it won't leak again.

We were so happy to get our basement clean and safe from being submerged this weekend. Luckily, we even took advantage of the seminary's cardboard recycling dumpster, so we were able to get the cardboard (some pieces were v-e-r-y soggy) before mildew set in. :) So, we were ready to enjoy a relaxing Sunday night, when I stepped on our kitchen rug and felt the tell-tale sign of leaking water. We pulled stuff out from under our sink and lo and behold, our sink pipes were leaking. It was very fortunate (read: God's provision) that it was just a couple of loose joints, so we were able to fix it with a couple of quick twists.Then, as we were getting ready for bed on Sunday night...drip, drip, drip...Rusty set right in and tightened our sink thing-y and fixed it right up! (For those of you who haven't seen our small bathroom...here it is. Very convenient for multi-tasking in the bathroom...I'll leave it at that. You can use the photo to determine what you can multi-task in during bathroom time....)

So, in conclusion, I believe almost everything that could have leaked in our house did this past weekend. I really do love water, but not when it is places that it shouldn't be. Funny how water left long enough causes lots of yucky damage. I was very proud of us for getting right in and fixing those problems. The Lord was gracious to us with the last two problems...they were very easy fixes. He knew we couldn't handle another 3 day water problem. Well, I know that I'm exhausted after such a wet and wild weekend. I hope this week will be restful... :)