Not exactly how we wanted to start our August...but that sounds about right for us.

So Monday morning around 8 am Gavin woke us up telling us that the floor was wet downstairs. Boy was it ever!

I guess we got a downpour during the night that included so much rain that it was more than all the rain our area gets all summer. We got that much in one night. Add that to the fact we just mowed the lawn and took out rain gutter extensions off and you get full window wells that flood your basement.

We quickly moved the furniture and called neighbors to find shop vacs. Our sister-in-law Angie and neice and nephew Emily and Ryan came over and helped us suck out water all morning. It became a party when Brett's parents brought pizza for everyone and got in on the sucking up water action.

It still wasn't getting all the water out. One of our neighbors had access to an industrial strength carpet cleaner that was able to suck a lot of water out. That helped a ton.

All in all I think we sucked out about 35 gallons of water! What a mess.

The following days have been trial and error on how to best dry out pad and carpet. We want to keep the pad we just replaced a couple of years ago. We finally moved the pad to the garage and let the sunshine dry it. Fans have been going all day and night for 5 days.

We decided to re-paint while the carpet is up. It has needed a paint job for a while and we had to cut out some drywall anyway.

Hopefully in the long run our basement will look great. The process and timing is not the best. But I guess sometimes you will only improve things if you are forced to.

(Don't look too close at the dirty floor.  We just moved the couches.  It always shocks me how much junk resides under the couches)

That is actually a good half inch of standing water.  Luckily some of our basement is concrete.  Concrete is much easier to get water up from.

This is a cute story.  Alec kept trying to find ways to help.  He had this brilliant idea to put paper towels down and have his walking dinosaurs walk on them to pull the water up.  Brilliant!!

We dumped dozens of buckets of water.  I can't believe how much water was in our carpet.

Here's to unexpected clean carpets, new paint, and organized bookshelves!