Hazy Shade of Winter- a plumbing fail tale

It's March 7th- I am so very tired of winter. I had hoped to keep a positive attitude throughout the remainder of this season, but Mother Nature has pushed me to the limit and beyond. Over the weekend, the temperature warmed to the mid-40s and our two feet of snow began to melt quickly. Then, it began to rain. Suddenly, the ground was just completely overwhelmed with water. The weather channel had issued several flood warnings, but we failed to consider how that might affect us. On Sunday morning, we discovered that our basement had collected 2-3 inches of water. We quickly got to work moving stuff off of the floor. It was a complete mess. We had so much stuff just thrown everywhere- cardboard packaging, tools, etc. The absolute worst part of the mess was a brand new bag of dog food that had the bottom fall out. I cannot even describe how vile wet dog food is after floating around a flooded basement. Man, Adam was so pissed when that bag busted open! It was just so frustrating! Stupidly, we still had cardboard moving boxes sitting directly on the basement floor. They contained all sorts of random memorabilia and items that you have no idea where to put in your house, but don't want to throw away. I had looked at those boxes several times over the last couple weeks, thinking, "I should really move those." Hindsight is 20/20, right? It was disappointing to throw some of our things away- we lost some wedding mementos, including our planner and guest book. But, as I told Adam, it could have been a lot worse. We are still married and have two happy and healthy kids- I'd say we can live without the wedding planner at this point! At the end of the day, what good is having stuff that you just keep in boxes anyway? It actually felt good to purge some of these things that were just taking up space.

It took us an hour or so just to get everything cleaned up so we could start working on trying to get the water out and figuring out what the problem was. After moving everything off the floor and salvaging what we could, Adam went and purchased a pump. It took a few hours for the water to drain, but we were feeling good that it was out. Then, it came back. At that point, we realized that we had a bigger problem. Our drainage system was clearly malfunctioning. We thought we had a sump pump, but in actuality, we have a sump pump hole. This house is so old that it's hard to figure out what's what when it comes to how it is plumbed. The groundwater was overwhelming our regular drain, which appeared to be very clogged. We couldn't figure out how to snake the drain. For that matter, we couldn't even figure out which drain to snake. There is one hole in our basement that holds an old drain pipe made out of terracotta! We had to continue pumping water out every few hours throughout the night because the hardware stores were closed and we couldn't get the tool we needed. Adam woke up super early today, rented a power snake and worked on the drain puzzle for a few hours, before we finally decided to call in the professionals. Enter Rooter Man. The guys from Rooter Man were nice and helped Adam better understand how things were set up. They cleared out giant tree roots that were growing into the drain, in addition to some other nastiness, of which I will spare you the details. So $350 later, things are draining and Adam has a plan to install a sump pump to take care of future excess groundwater. We just finished mopping the floor with bleach and water. It has been a rough couple of days.

After all this, you'd think, "well, winter is almost over." However- did I mention that we got 5-6 inches of snow and 1/4 inch of ice today!?! What's that saying- anything in excess is never a good thing? Shouldn't this count for weather? I am just over it and can no longer sugarcoat it. I don't want to go snowshoeing or build a snowman. I have been a really good sport during a very hard winter. I really hope that the groundhog is correct, and that spring is coming early. I also hope that spring does not include too many torrential downpours- at least until we get that sump pump working. Blech!