a week ago tonight...

I came home to a quiet house after a long day of work. Pete was working , so my plan was to accomplish a few little projects around the house after I ate dinner. Things like calling a college friend. Maybe doing a little cleaning. Perhaps finishing up The Gifts of the Jews. Or maybe all three.

My plans were dramatically altered when, after dinner, newspaper and too much Seventh Heaven on the ABC Family channel (why does that show suck me in? It's so silly!), I got up from the couch and stepped out into our basement hallway to go upstairs. Squish went the carpet under my feet. I had a glass of water in my hand...maybe I tipped it and spilled some? Another step. Squish. By then, I'm in front of the door to our laundry room and panic quickly sets in. Shoes are floating around the bottom of our freezer. A few items that are normally upright have been knocked over and lying in a pool of water - not a puddle but a pool. A pool that covers the entire laundry room and under my feet.

My heart pounding and my mind racing ("I'm alone. What will I do? Will insurance cover this? Is our basement ruined? We don't have the money for this! AHHHHHHH!!!!) I know the culprit so I go upstairs and sure enough, the toilet on our second floor is running. And running. And running. It has been this way for more than an hour. And it's coming up through the drain in our basement. It's happened once before, but we caught it in time (and figured out the problem after an hour of baling water and a call to the city). Just days before, we'd even talked about how we needed to call a plumber to come look at the basement drain. It was on the to-do list...

I know Pete's completely out-of-pocket (Tuesday night is ropes course night for his kids) so I leave a desperate and somewhat tearful message for my dad. And then another tearful message for Pete. And I start rescuing items from our basement floor in our carpeted rec room. Things like the computer. The PlayStation. The surround sound system speakers. Water is seeping under the wall from the laundry room and soaking the carpet. I think I'm on the verge of hyperventilating. I know our neighbor, Bob, is home. Would he be able to help if I can't get ahold of my dad? I call my dad again and reach him. Dad to the rescue! We harness the power of our shop vacs and suck up water - lots and lots of it. My dad is a saint, especially when he's emptying gallons of water outside in the rain.

Pete comes home around 10:30 and continues to clean until about 2:00 a.m. He is a rock (and he should be - that's his name, right?) I appreciate his calm demeanor, even when I want him to freak out along with me. :)

Long story short: we apparently have tree roots in our drain out to the sewer. The kind man from Penning Plumbing took care of them on Wednesday, but said it will probably continue to be a problem - a hazard of living in an older neighborhood with mature trees and old pipes (that aren't PVC). We've ripped out all of the carpet from the basement - and discovered what we think is mold on the back. So perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. We've also discovered signs that this may have happened before, perhaps in the last several years. Funny the things people don't mention when they're selling a house. And no, NONE of this is covered by our insurance (apparently you need a provision for floods caused by drain back-ups. We don't have that provision. Grrr...) But we've found an inexpensive option for carpet replacement, the paneling seems fine, and we wanted to put vinyl at the bottom of the stairs anyway. So we'll do a nice little remodel - a little earlier than planned, but the results will be worth it.

I'll end this very long post with a few pictures of June 6 and its aftermath...some of them turned out blurry and I don't have the photographic finesse to capture the "magnitude" of the water.