We were supposed to stay Sunday night in Chicago and visit the museums, but decided we'd just head home instead. Thank goodness we did. We arrived home late Sunday night and Alex went to his playroom and declared "Mom, Bobo (Brutus) peed!". Since we had dropped Brutus off at his doggie pet resort and he has never peed in the basement I immediately froze and knew what had happened....Yup, our basement flooded. Nearly all 730 sq. ft of it was covered with raw sewage. I immediately took Alex's socks off and got him upstairs and we went down to survey the damage.
We were actually very fortunate given the circumstances. I thankfully had caught up on laundry the majority of our dirty clothes didn't get ruined, minus my cloth diapers :( The major things like our hot water heater, washer & dryer, and furnace were all fine. Alex lost a few toys but has more than plenty to make up for them and actually he hasn't even missed the ones that are all piled up in the garage currently. We lost the sofa bed, and thus our guest bedroom, but it's all temporary.
We soon determined that we really had only about an inch of water/crud spread throughout the place. The problem was we were gone for 4 days so it had time to seep up the drywall. We got someone out ASAP to clean it up and then we had 12 industrial fans drying it out until Friday. I can't wait to see this month's electric bill!
I've been fighting with the county ever since. They feel that they are not liable in anyway, but I'm going to see if I can change their minds. This hasn't happened to this house ever and there wasn't that much rain and 2 other houses on our street got damaged. Getting them to pitch in any money is going to be a long haul, but we'll see if they come around.
I can't say I'll be sad to see my original 1970s groovy decor leave--do try not to be jealous. Although, we will be keeping the wall paper in the laundry room since it wasn't damaged :)
