I think we see a silver lining...it's pretty faint still...

Friday night Tenisha's mom came down to play with Tyson so we could work together on demolition downstairs. Jason did a lot of tearing up of carpet, padding and linoleum yesterday by himself while Tenisha had the job of playing with Tyson and making important phone calls. One of those calls was to the insurance company. Of course we don't have flood insurance, we're not in a flood zone!!! Our car, the Honda, was a bit soggy. There was standing water in it. The outside flood line was a bit higher than what came in the house and it was too high to move the car once we realized how high it was actually getting...so in talking with the insurance we figured out the engine had been submerged (wouldn't start) and we are covered for flood damage!!! yay! We have to wait til next week to talk with the adjuster...we're sort of preparing for it to be a total loss, we'll see..It will be sad to see her go, when we are on road trips we get 32-34 mpg. Is there any other car that comes close to that for $2,000? Doubt it.

Today we tore up the 'snap together laminate', which we were told by a couple of people (flood specialist and Home Depot flooring specialist) that it probably wouldn't be salvagable. Well, we started unsnaping it and lo and behold it was laid on plastic on top of the concrete, just snapped together and a little wet. The backing of it was waterproof, not like the felt we saw at the store! We took it apart, wiped it down and set it out to dry. A few hours later it was dry and looking great!! We probably saved at least 90% of it. Hopefully that room will go back together really easily.

Then...our neighbor had a ton of family over helping them clear out their basement (they've lived here 30 years!!!) and asked to take our load to the dump for us and didn't want us to even pay the dump fee! That was such a surprise as we were talking about how we were going to do that. All of the flooring we had removed at that point fit into one pickup and he was more than willing to do it! What a blessing!!

We found out from the same neighbor the rest of the water story. As the water was rising we and they called about it and let the city know there was a problem. A person came by to check it out and said the culvert wasn't blocked it was just too much water to handle. This visit happened before the water was in our houses. Apparently at 4:00 am they came back and CLEARED a BLOCKAGE in the culvert and by 6:00 am when we got up all the water was gone. So apparently this was preventable. Our neighbors were sure it was a blockage as it happened 3 years ago but it was taken care of right away and didn't get nearly this bad. A little water in the park was all. So our houses plus a few more at the other end of the creek were the unlucky receipients of a flood. Should the city be responsible for this? We're wondering...

Well that's all I can think of for now..we have a dehumidifier downstairs chugging away...makes it dehydrating working down there but it sure is drying everything up nicely. We will talk to a flood repair service on Monday to get an idea of what all needs to be done.

We'll keep you posted! :O)

post flood update

well..when we woke up this morning at 6:00 (Jason called into work...emergency day!) the floods had receded. The basement is now empty...except for soggy carpet and a nice debris line about 6 inches up. We figured out the oven breaker switch problem. It's the one marked 'dryer'. Huh.. should we have guessed that? We were trying to keep that one off seeing that the dryer was sitting in a deep pool of water. So today will be cleaning, pulling up carpet, removing baseboards and letting the washer and dryer dry out to see if they are salvagable. If you were to drive down our street today the sun is shining, there's a half inch of snow on the ground and barely any water in the road. The creek is full, but doesn't look so vicious as it did last night flowing through our house. Crazy.

Rain, rain go away....seriously!

Well, I had honestly started a blog earlier today and we were working on picking out which pictures to use. We've been wonderfully busy the past month and have been documenting it, just not downloading the photos and blogging about it.

BUT......that blog is on hold now and we have an update...

The rain that has fallen for the past day finally turned to snow at 1:00am or so...I guess it's officially Jan 2 as I write this. And yes, we were still awake to see that transition. All day we've been watching the creek in the park get higher and wider and thought that at the most we might have a soggy backyard. We popped in a movie at 7:45 with all of the water still on the other side of the fence. When the movie was over at 9:45 we went to let Jada out for a night time potty break. There was what looked to be a lake in our backyard. Further investigation down the staircase revealed the water was up to the bottom step (about 4 inches high) and there was a river flowing along the side of the house!!!!

Jason opened the side gate to release the flow, the street in the front was already filling up. We also noticed a trickle of water coming in the side door. A visit from the neighbors helped as they knew what number to call to complain about the creek's culvert being stopped up. To make a very long story short....It is 2:45am and the entire basement is now covered in 4-5 inches of water. It covers the bottom step of our inside staircase. We spent a few hours moving everything (furniture included) upstairs. Once it started it went really fast. The street finally spilled over into the front yard...it's now completely underwater as well. Our cars have water over halfway up the tires. From our porch when you look to the left it looks like a river running into the ocean. Trucks attempting to drive by end up with water over the hood of the truck!

Amazingly Tyson has slept through this whole thing!! And so far we still have power and hot water. Jason turned off the power to downstairs and in trying to figure out the breakers hit one for the kitchen and now the stove won't turn back on even though every thing else is on. Hmmm...we've even double checked and flipped and nothing....grrr... but for now we are doing fine...just a little frustrated at the prospect of all of the water damage downstairs. The washer and dryer are sitting in water right now...

Ah well. It's all just stuff. We're safe and warm for the time being. We've had record snowfall and record flooding (we live at 436 ft above sealevel! They deemed us 'not in a flood plain' for insurance....Ha!). What other adventures are in store for us here? :O)

We're gonna watch the snow for a few more minutes, then head to bed. Ty will be making his appearance around 7:00 or so. Maybe this morning will be one of those God given mornings where he sleeps in till 8 or 8:30...It happened last week!

Night Night.

He will be a GREAT big brother!

Photos

So Tarena finished picking out the good pictures and amazingly there's quite a selection!!! Tyson was so grumpy, yet there are a lot of smiles and smirks in there...

Mom's...for part of your Christmas present you each get an 8x10. We've been trying to figure out how to pick and then just decided you should go through and let us know which one you want. If you want to buy any others you can let us know as well and we can order them all together.

We're still trying to pick our favorites!

http://www.threetreephotographyjtt.blogspot.com/

shiny new boots

how do you not laugh?