Some days are just those kind of days

You know when you have something that you are planning to do, but something happens to make you do it when you weren't planning on doing it? Yep...we've had many of those day. One of those days just happened to be recently. I heard this strange noise coming from the side of the house right before I was about to drop the kids off at school. It sounded like maybe someone was doing something in the street. Anyway, I finished getting the kids ready and dropped them off. When I got home, the noise was still there. I pondered it for awhile and finally decided it sounded like water was running. I knew we had recently turned the water outside back on to fill up the hot tub so maybe someone/thing hit the faucet and it turned one. I opened the door and looked toward the side of the house. There was a beautiful little stream coming toward the door. I knew if there was water in a stream already, the faucet most definately was on. I raced over to the faucet only to find that it wasn't turned on. Earlier in the year we had turned off the water and drained the pipes, however, when we filled up the hot tub we forgot to both turn off the water and redrain everything. And....the PVC pipe froze and broke and now there was no way to shut off the GUSHING water on the outside. I had NO CLUE where the shut off value is on the inside of the house (yes I know realize there are probably many things I should find out...just in case). Very thankfully, Arlie wasn't in a meeting and answered his work phone. He told me it was in the basement. I opened the basement door to the sound of water pouring in and a lovely 1 - 2 inch flood across my basement floor and on everything that we had neglected to put away. I found the shut-off valve and quickly got off the phone and got the shot vac. Arlie headed directly home to help me figure out what to do. I had already filled (as full as i could carry) the shop vac four times before Arlie got home and there was still water every where. We decided the best thing to do was put a tarp in the family room, bring everything up on that and clean up the water. Now here is the thing: we had already been planning on cleaning the basement and relatively soon, just not that day! We decided that that day was going to be our new cleaning the basement day. It took 12 hours to bring everything up, clean up the water and then we cleaned the shelves and brought everything back down organized. We got rid of a whole car load of stuff (thank you Savers!) and much more to the garbage can (thank you City of Blaine :)). It was one of those things where you never want it to happen, but it sure jump started our spring cleaning. Now we had a beautiful basement again, well, maybe I wouldn't call it beautiful but it's CLEAN! :) The human part....I'll post pictures. It's very humbling to do so because I allowed it to get really messy down there. For anyone who thought I wasn't human...here's your proof!

All the stuff from the basement floor in our family room



Finished product!