It seems like it has been much longer than a month ago that I wrote this post. After many weeks of disruption and work, we are finally close to having our basement back in order.
The painter finished up everything on Monday of last week. After that the carpenter had some remaining work to do on the doors an the baseboards. Once his work was finished, the carpet people were able to come in and put a new pad under old carpet. They spent another day stretching and putting the old carpet back down before the final workers came through to clean and deodorize it.
As of right now we are still waiting for the project manager to do a walk-through of the house and do the final sign off so we can be back to normal.
Jovi will be very happy when she no longer needs to be locked up in her crate during the day. She is like a wild animal when we let her out after work in the evening. It is just easier for every involved if we lock her up. Otherwise she would stand at the top of the stairs and bark at the workers the whole time.
The project manager gave us the okay to start moving our furniture back into the rooms downstairs this past weekend. It wasn't much of a shock to me when 
Overall, we are very happy with the work that was done by all of the contractors involved. It almost feels like we need to start spending some more time down in the basement.
The old TV stand that we were using was made of particle board. That kind of wood doesn't handle it very well when it gets wet and the feet started splitting and swelling. We hauled it out to the side of the road and for now we are going to use this table that my dad made for me when I was younger.
Jovi is still getting used to being able to come down in the basement while we are home. We really expected her to spend more time down there this weekend after we had her couch and chair back in place. Instead she chose to spend an uncommon amount of time with us upstairs.
You would think after a month she would be more than happy to get back down in the cold dark basement where she can listen to her death metal and play her first person shooter games, but maybe we are growing on her :)
These were my three biggest goals for the weekend:
- Get enough stuff moved out of the garage that
- Get things set up in the downstairs living room so
- Get the electronic equipment (printer, modem, router, media server) moved back down to the office and out of our bedroom.
Thankfully, I was able to accomplish all of those things. The stress of having your house flood is horrible. Add to that having everything "out of order" and cluttered around, and it can be downright oppressive.
This weekend we thankfully made another step towards "normalcy".
I still need to have a contractor come in and give us an estimate for adding a backup sump pump to our basement. I want to make sure that we never have to go through this again.
We actually got pretty lucky, after the portion that our insurance is going to pay for, we will owe just over $2000 USD for the whole project. It could have been much worse and I might be walking around with a few less organs if that were the case.
If you have the option to add the Sump/Sewer coverage to your home owners policy, I highly recommend you do it. The extra five dollars a month you pay towards the premium is well worth it when something like this happens to you.
The biggest concern we have right now is the fact that it still smells. It isn't nearly as bad as it was when the disaster first happened, but there is still a definite "musty" smell to the basement. The cost to replace the carpet was more than we were able to spend right now. We made the choice to keep the old carpet and hope the cleaning and deodorizing would take care of things.
At this point, if the smell does not go away over time, we will probably start saving up money so we can replace the flooring in the basement at some point in the future.
