Flood of 2009, Duct Tape Syndrome, and Little Chinaman

I had such a busy weekend redoing my floor. I will blog about my floor in due time, but first let me preface the reason the floor needed redoing.

So anyways, a year ago last June, we got a phone call from Kaler, my oldest son, to get home right away because water was coming into the house. It was raining and it was coming down pretty hard. We learned later that it rained 2 inches in one hour. We figured there would be water seeping under our sliding doors. Well, when we arrived about 20 minutes later, the water level was about a foot deep around the outside of our house. Most of my pictures are taken after the water had receded.

All the junk in this photo started out behind our house. (I'm going to say, neatly stacked up.)

Kaler and Jance, my two boys, and their friend were all furiously trying to dig a ditch to guide the water away from the house. The whole while, it was raining buckets! They had dams built the best they could, bless their hearts! They said they saw a cat floating by in the river of fast moving water. They took this picture of the poor kitty after she made it ashore.

We walked down the steps to the house. Holy Crap! We even said it aloud. I opened the door and found about 7 inches of water and mud inside our house, wall to wall. We had to wait for the water outside to recede before the water in the house would drain out. This picture was after most of the water had drained, and most of the rest of it was thick mud.

We live in a tiny, single level house. There wasn't a single inch of dry floor inside our entire house. We live on a hill, a pretty big one, but my neighbor who pulled out all of his orchard and plowed and tilled all those acres into nice, fluffy soil, to plant alfalfa, lives just a bit higher than us. So, when the rain came down that hard, all of his fluffy topsoil came barreling down into our yard and into the house. Neither the insurance or the neighbor took any responsibility for any of the cost to clean it up.

There was nothing we could do with the carpeting, so we put our efforts into cleaning up the kitchen. After we got the water out, there was about an inch and a half of mud across the whole floor. We would fill a dustpan with heavy mud with each pass. We had that floor completely cleaned up including getting mud out of all the nooks and crannies. As we were deciding what to do about all the furniture and other stuff that was getting ruined, it started to rain again, and the water and mud came in again, and all of our efforts were for nothing. I said a couple of bad words. We re-cleaned the kitchen and bathroom. At this point it was after 10:00 and I went to bed. Our blankets hung down to the floor and absorbed muddy water. Can you imagine getting in bed with cold, wet muddy edges of your blankets, then getting out of bed in the morning to step on wet, muddy carpeting? Our neighbor, the one who lost all his topsoil to our house, had his workers come and dig a canal through our little backyard orchard taking out 4 of our fruit trees, because, once again, it was supposed to rain hard, and rain it did. The canal seemed to work.

So, all of our belongings had to go into storage. They've been there for over a year. Since the house was empty, we decided to renovate the interior of the house at such an opportune time. Unfortunately, Craig has been busy meeting deadlines and hasn't been able to put much time into the house. We've been living with what I call 'duct tape syndrome', meaning, if we can live in this condition for a week, then I'll bet we'll survive a month, six months, a year, etc. So here we are one year and four months later, and I finally have a floor I can write about, but I won't. Yet.

This is my favorite picture to come from the flood.

This little Chinaman washed up after the first big dumping. It's actually Kaler's friend who stayed out in the rain getting soaking wet, helping us build dams and guide water the entire time. He was able to push his boat (sled that he had found floating in the water) around the entire lawn. He is sitting on a bucket that he also found floating in the water.