The Sump Pump Dumps

In case you've been living in a hole (or not in the Midwest), Sioux Falls has gotten record amounts of rainfall this month. And it hasn't necessarily been a "rain a little bit every day" kind of thing; it's been more of a "let's dump an inch of rain (and hail!) an hour" kind of thing. Great for keeping our lawn nice and green, not great for flooding.

In our old house, we never worried about heavy rains. Because we had a split-level house, our basement was only four-feet under ground, and on the off-chance that the ground became SO saturated that it would cause flooding issues at that shallow depth, we also chose to install a sump pump. In the (almost) five years we lived there, I think there were only three rainstorms that were bad enough to cause our sump pump to run. So when the rain started to POUR down on Saturday night, we didn't think a whole lot of it. Our new house is also a split-level (although it may have a five-foot basement), and it is also equipped with a sump pump, which the previous owners had told us was in working condition. We saw posts on Facebook about people having to clean water out of their basements, and even went to church Sunday morning where we heard more of the same stories. In spite of all this, it still never crossed our mind to go check our basement.

In fact, the only reason Darrell actually went down to the basement Sunday after church was that he wanted to touch up the paint on some of the walls we had scuffed trying (and failing) to move our couch downstairs the night before (that's a story for a different post). All it took was one step off the bottom stair to realize that we were in trouble--BIG trouble. I'll spare you the details for now because I don't have any of the pictures uploaded, but for all intents and purposes there was at least an inch of standing water covering 90% of our basement. And our sump pump? Completely full of water and not pumping a lick. Were we shocked and upset? Absolutely. But devastated? Not so much. Here's why:

1. Because we discovered the damage on a Sunday, Darrell didn't have to take time off work to help clean up some of the water and relocate our stuff (granted, I don't think shop vac-ing 175 gallons of water out of the basement was high on Darrell's to-do list for Father's Day, but whatever). 

2. The rain we got Saturday/Sunday was not nearly as bad as the rain we got on Monday. When we called our plumber, water removal service, and insurance agent on Sunday, they were already backed up (our insurance agent was still dealing with hail damage claims from the week before!). However, given the rain and flooding that occurred on Monday, I am certain all of those people are even more backed up.

3. Despite being busy, our plumber was able to get to the house Monday morning and fix (aka replace) our sump pump, which meant that we got no new water in the basement during that storm (it makes me shudder to think how much more we could have gotten; our sump pump was running almost continuously for a solid eight hours). Additionally, Intek was able to get here Monday evening to get rid of the damaged carpet and suck the rest of the water out, which was good because it was already starting to get pretty dank smelling down there.

4. Darrell and I pretty much hated most of the finishings in the basement--the two bedrooms had industrial-style carpet, and some of the walls had some awful wood paneling. The majority of the carpet was ripped out as a total loss, and most of the wood paneling was removed because it was going to prevent the drywall from drying out. Although this is much sooner than we had anticipated re-doing the basement, now we'll get to do some of it with our insurance money (less our deductible, of course--but that's an insignificant amount compared to what it would have cost to re-carpet the entire basement). 

5. Aside from the carpet and wood paneling, there was hardly any damage (I'm certainly not going to lose sleep over throwing away a few wet pillows). All of our storage areas got flooded, but when we moved I insisted that anything placed into our storage areas was stored in a plastic tote, not a cardboard box. So no damage there. Additionally, the bedroom that was storing all of our boxes with our picture frames and wall decor items (because we haven't gotten around to doing any decorating) had a stage built into it (don't ask why), and for whatever reason when we moved in I put all of the boxes on the stage instead of on the floor. So all of those items stayed nice and dry.  However, the bottom of a few electronic items (namely our shredder and Darrell's old, old desktop computer) got a little wet, and we haven't gotten around to testing either to assess the damage. Thankfully, a shredder is easily replaceable and I'm pretty sure we moved all "valuables" from Darrell's desktop to our laptop years ago, so there shouldn't be any major losses there. 

Does it suck to have a flooded basement? Absolutely. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy (well... Maybe a little bit of water. They are my worst enemy after all). But this is why we have homeowner's insurance, and why we had the sellers purchase a one-year warranty on all appliances in the house. Granted, we were anticipating that the warranty would come in handy on the 26 year-old furnace and air conditioner, not the sump pump, but whatever. Covered is covered. Now if only the massive dehumidifier and three industrial fans would dry up the last bit of carpet downstairs so our house stops smelling so dank that'd be great. And then I can get started transforming our basement into something I'm proud of!