THE GREAT FLOOD OF '08

If you've never Googled "category 3 black water" before, you should. This is what flooded in our basement thanks to a backed up toilet upstairs. I'll spare the gruesomest of details and just say that the toilet was backing up into our shower and bathroom upstairs. The shower pipe broke and thus began THE GREAT FLOOD OF '08.

(Is that totally gross or what? And this is after Scott rinsed part of it down!)

For a moment (before I went downstairs to survey the damage) it sounded very tranquil like I had my own private waterfall newly installed. Waterfall yes, not the kind you want to splash around in. Six or seven 5-gallon buckets full and several hours later the disaster people (I liked to think of them as the HAZ-MAT team) told us anything the water touched had to be thrown out.

I much prefer the waterfalls along the Road to Hana on Maui to the one in our basement!

Fortunately, Scott and I had salvaged a large collection of children's books, the kids bean bag chairs, other pictures on the walls and the TV and entertainment center. Toys on the floor, carpeting, a couch, the ceiling, those six or seven 5 gallon buckets, light fixtures (but they were ugly so good riddance), various beach towels to mop up the mess were all taken off by my HAZ-MAT friends and in came 6 de-humidifiers and fans servicing the basement and also our bathroom where the problem initially surfaced. Did I mention the kids' bedrooms are downstairs? You can see this did not take anyone to a happy place. Blake kept asking to go to a hotel--which was not a bad idea for a 3 year old!

The kids were amazing at adapting to the new rules in the house such as: Brock could only be put on the carpet in certain "Clean" areas (he had just learned to walk so this was a HUGE challenge), flip flops were a must everywhere (especially because there was no flooring downstairs and with the construction going on there were nails and drywall etc. everywhere) and always wash your hands! They especially loved sleeping upstairs in "The Clean Zone" while the de-humidifiers and Air Scrubbers were drying the walls and floor and cleaning the air.

We decided to go a head with the construction during Christmas Break which was another challenge but Scott and I both felt like waiting longer was going to drive us all into the looney bin! By this time we all had been bouncing in and out of there anyway. So with a Ho Ho Ho, Christmas Eve came and we barely got our tree and stockings up in time for Santa to arrive.

I think Brock was totally confused by the time Christmas rolled around. He had the weirdest 1st Christmas ever but it doesn't look like he'll need therapy. . . for this at least!

Here's the rainbow at the end of our cesspool: because of all the damage and yuck that was tracked all through the house we were able to re-carpet everything! Bathrooms got new tile, up and downstairs got new carpet, 6 rooms got new paint, a new ceiling of course and we expanded the downstairs bathroom making it possible for 4 boys to function there. Without the help of our Cat3 H2O we would not have been able to do all these renovations for several more years--So in the end, we were very grateful for THE GREAT FLOOD OF '08.