Seeing is Believing
They are telling us that the rain is over, but until I see that the concrete in the drive is dry, I am being doubtful.
Our neighbor has a huge rain gauge and when I visited with Randy, he was reporting 8.9 inches since Wednesday. Hmm.
When I got up at seven and saw the city crew was pumping water from the main holes, I didn’t know what to think. I got up and had my usual routines before I wanted to reassure myself all would be good in the basement. The fact that the sump pump hardly took a break made me need to find out for myself. I flipped the switch for the basement lights. When I could stand at the top of the basement steps and see an overhead bulb reflect off of the floor, I knew all was not good.
It matters not what lay ahead as we would not be the only people doing a bucket brigade. The first thing I did was to clean the canister of our shop vac. I couldn’t do anything in the large studio room until the floor drain was down. After an hour, I knew it was safe to run the shop vac, the floor drain was down. The sucked up water could be poured into the toilet. There is a closet right next to the stair steps that water was running over the first basement step and going into the tile for the sump pump. Of course the far corner of said closet is quite a bit lower than next to the steps.
We have a wonderful old wooden courthouse chair in the studio that is on rollers. After the shop vac was set up for wet vac, I set the shop vac on the seat of the chair. I began sucking up the water from the floor of the closet. I could tell when the canister was getting full. I would roll the chair over to the toilet and empty it and go back for more. This water was coming in fairly fast. Though we had the eve spouts on the house to have taken the rain away from the house, the ground was like a loaded sponge. The foundation on the east side of the house had a crack that was like its own faucet. Eventually the seepage will subside.
Nothing had gotten ruined as nothing sits on the floor in the studio. It is after all spring. Spring cleaning of the cement floor in the studio . . . it’s a good thing.
When the skies clear, I will believe the rain is over . . . for now.