I've never lived in a house with a basement before. My parents house had a crawlspace and the houses I lived in after I moved out were either on a slab or a crawl space. I was pretty excited when 
Although they don't happen that often, tornado's are an occasional threat where we live. That means having a basement is an extra layer of protection should one occur.
The thing that always kept me a little hesitant about basements was the chance of them flooding. Unfortunately for us (depending on how you look at it), the latter happened instead of the former.
12:30 AM
Just barely into Wednesday morning our phones started going off with an alert that there was the potential for some flash flooding. I thought to myself that I should probably go downstairs and check the sump pump, but I didn't, rolled over and fell back asleep.
4:00 AM
I knew what it had to be before I even went downstairs to look. It had been recommended to us that we get a back-up sump pump when we bought the house. Not having the money for the additional cost I kept putting it off and taking our chances. I fully blame myself for everything that we are no dealing with.
Sure enough, the sump pump had failed and we were now looking at about 1 to 3 inches of water in our basement. Every room! There wasn't a square inch that had been spared the devastation. I tried to get the old pump working again by unplugging it and plugging it back in, but it was a no go.
Keep in mind, it is probably about 4:30 in the morning right now, so basically nothing is open besides Meijer or WalMart. I quickly hopped in my truck and drove the 15 minutes to town to pick see if either of those stores had a new sump pump.
Luckily, the first store I stopped at, Meijer had one. I snatched it fast in case one of the other non-existent customers at 4:45 in the morning tried to get it first. After paying my left arm for the stupid pump, I rushed home and prepared to install it.
Raise your hand if you knew that sump pumps need a special connector and a back flow valve before you install them. Hint: my hand is down right now. After realizing it wasn't going to work out of the box, I tried to get the connector and valve off the old pump.
I don't have a pipe wrench and the channel locks I had were much to small to fit around the pipe. Plus it was plastic and I didn't want to risk cracking it. Meanwhile, because I had removed the old pump, more water was flowing back into those house via the exhaust line for the old pump.
5:45 AM
By now it was close enough to 6 AM that the large home improvement stores would be opening. I quickly hopped back into my truck and drove back into town while
I went into Lowe's and found the connector I needed. Luckily they were sitting right next to the back flow valve otherwise I wouldn't have realized I probably needed one of those too. I grabbed one of each, paid, and made my way back to the house.
If you look at the picture above closely, you can see the level the water was at around the toilet, tub, and vanity.
7:00 AM
By this time and after some adjustments with a hacksaw to the outflow pipe, I had the new sump pump running non-stop. The old pump was a 1/4 hp pump, and the new one was a 3/4 hp (mostly because that is all they had). It took about two hours before all of the standing water was gone.
Meanwhile, I had remembered seeing something in our home owners insurance about flood damage. I quickly went out too our paperwork and found that by some miracle, we had indeed added coverage to our policy. Albeit a small amount, but anything is better than having to shoulder the full cost ourselves.
I called our insurance company and quickly got a claim started. They let me know that I could use any company I wanted for the recovery so my next call was the 24 hour line of a local business.
8:30 AM
The guy was on his way to another call in a nearby city, but our house was on his way so he stopped in quick and got the ball rolling.
9:30 AM
By this time the crew had showed up and they were staring to vacuum up what they could of the remaining water. Thanks to our muck boots that we had purchase earlier in the Summer,
Sadly, this is just the beginning of what I feel is going to be a long long process. I have been taking pictures as we go and I plan on writing some more installments in this series.
Stay Tuned!
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