A Messy House Guest

Remember me mentioning Lee and the mess she was creating in our backyard?

Ya, TS Lee (Tropical Storm). She liked the backyard so much, she decided to move into the basement. Why not? There's a bathroom, bed and plenty of room right?

Unfortunately, Lee wasn't the best of house guests. She was kind of a strong tropical storm. Not only did she bring in 10 inches of water , but also thought we wouldn't be needing hot water or the internet while she was around. In fact, internet? It's always healthy to go on one of those diets, so why not go a good week.

Here's a bit of a recap from her stay:

Thursday morning--3 in. by the door. Grateful I was nesting the previous night and just for the heck of it cleaned up the cereal boxes, card games, and laundry.

By 4 pm, most of water was pumped out (straight into the backyard--which was probably not a good idea)...

Apparently Lee didn't feel too good about that, so she decided to show how badly she wanted to spend the night. It started pouring around then, and didn't stop until Friday evening.

By 9 pm we were pushing 6 inches, and when I went to bed at 1 am, 10 inches were in the basement with 3 sump pumps pumping it straight out to the street.

Thankfully our landlord and her husband were up for the party and came to help out into the wee morning hours.

Oh my gross. I still get heebie geebies from the dried rain on my legs after sloshing around in that stuff for so long.

The biggest culprit was probably the city pipe hooked up to our drain on the back steps.

Lee didn't have many places to go, so she came pouring in.

Thankfully, the amazing city workers must have worked all night long because miraculously, everything was drained by 6:30 am when I got up.

Heaven bless that woman for finally leaving!

And heaven surely showed us the many things for which we were grateful:
1. We don't own the house! (YAY, we don't have to permanently fix the problem ourselves)
2. All ruined furniture in the basement was free
3. It was room temperature outside (allowing us to easily leave the windows and doors open for ventilation)
4. We have an amazing network of church comrades who were so willing to help and found extra sump pumps when Home Depot was completely sold out
5. After two weeks of fans and a dehumidifier, everything is dry!!!

And Jackson??

He thought the whole thing was great fun, until I wouldn't let him play with our house guest, which caused sore tantrums for what felt like days.

He spent many hours trying to prove he was very capable of climbing to safety if need be. Even ending up on the dining room table to prove it. I seriously thought of letting him puddle jump in the basement, but then I thought of his love of bubble blowing, and decided muddy drain water was not the best place for him to be.

So we survived the upstairs quarantine and were ever so grateful when the rains totally subsided and we could go back to doing this:

Thanks for leaving Lee. Hopefully we won't be seeing you again.