Wednesday morning started off like any other day. Josh got home from work and went to bed. I was determined to have a good day and not cry at all. Sometime around 9:00 I thought I would put some Easter stuff away in the crawl space. I’ve been needing to dig around in there and get out all of our garage sale stuff anyway. (I’m having a garage sale next weekend and have yet to price the mountain of items.) I opened the door to the crawl space and flipped on the light. Pretty sure I was in shock seeing at least six inches of water right by the door. I stood there for what felt like minutes not sure what to do. I closed the door, ran upstairs and tried to gently wake up Josh.
“Josh… Honey, our crawl space is full of water. The sump pump must have stopped working.” Josh threw the covers back and yelled, “WHAT??”. I said, “Calm down. Breathe. I need you to get up”. I seriously don’t know how I was so calm. We ran downstairs and opened the door to the crawl space again. He decided to run to the closest place (10 minutes away) and get a new sump pump. I had him bring down the shop vac because I didn’t think I could just sit on the couch waiting for him to get home.
As he left I filled up the shop vac once. I got a few things out that I could easily reach and then didn’t know what else to do so I called my mom. “Mom? Our crawl space is flooded.” I think at this point when I tell my mom something else terrible has happened to us, she isn’t really surprised anymore. She offered to come help but I said that I didn’t know what she would do at that point. Josh got home in record time. He waded into the basement and hit the pipe for the sump pump. It instantly started working again.
We had the bulk of our stuff out in no time. Josh was inside bringing things to the door and I was drying and stacking them in our downstairs. Jasper was a rock star as usual. He played and watched TV while we worked. By lunch time the only things left were all of the garage sale items which is what I was dreading most. I store pretty much everything in Rubbermaid containers so that stuff was safe. Everything for the garage sale was in boxes or garage bags.
We decided to let the rest of the water drain since there was only about an inch left and Josh went to sleep some more. I tried to move a few things but after two boxes broke as I moved them I realized I had hit the wall and needed a break too. Thank goodness for my parents who took Jasper when they got off work. Josh and I laid tarps down on our living room floor and started hauling the really wet stuff out. It was a mess.
Unbelievably, most of the soaked boxes contained only clothes. I sorted through everything and moved everything for the garage sale up to the spare room. Six loads of laundry later and all clothes that I want to sell are clean again. We lost our old TV that I had planned on selling and a really old Christmas tree that needed to be retired anyway. Our old entertainment center that my brother is going to have someday was way back in the corner. Somehow that corner stayed pretty much dry so I think that survived. The biggest loss (for me) was my Real Simple magazine archive. I’ve been saving them since 2005. I lost all except the last year or so. When Josh hauled them out I had to turn away from the sadness.
This week has not exactly gone as planned. I now have one week to price an enormous amount of stuff for my garage sale. But by last night the crawl space was mostly dry and we were able to move everything back in. I’m so incredibly thankful that Josh was home when I discovered the water. I’m thankful that I store everything in Rubbermaids and all of our stuff was safe. I’m thankful that I found the water when I did and our whole downstairs didn’t flood.
Having everything a mess like this is basically like living in a nightmare for me but I know it could have been so much worse. Josh and I agreed that had this happened a year ago we would have reacted a lot differently. I feel like after the year we’ve had I can handle things so much better. I did cry a few times on Wednesday but I totally didn’t lose it. I think the crawl space flooding is a good cap to our year of bad luck. May 7th is circled on our calendar. That day last year is the day that everything changed for us. I think we’ll buy a lotto ticket on the 7th. Time for Karma to work in our favor…I think we’ve had enough.