1) At the end of August Gary went on a one week business trip to Georgia. Of course that was also the time Hurricane Irene decided to show up! Thankfully he was able to get on the last flight in the morning before they started to cancel all of the other flights. I would of been so depressed if he had to stay there longer. It was so good to see him. I felt like it had been forever!
2) The day before I collected all of the items in the yard that could potentially fly away in our house which was a LOT. I never realized how much stuff we had out there.
3) Before Gary came home I hung plastic over the door and used duct tape to keep it in place. I wasn't sure if it would stick, but I figured that I should at least try to prevent water from entering the house if i could. I was pleasantly surprised that it worked! It fell off just as the water was receding the next day.
4) The Hurricane of course brought lots of water and wind, but it didn't get really bad until like 1-2am. I was asleep so I didn't witness it. I don't know why, but Gary got up at around 3am and decided to check on the basement. Thank goodness, because he noticed that our basement was flooding. :( I woke up when I heard the wet vac on and discovered the bad news.
5) It's unfortunate that this happen, because we were making great progress on our basement. Because of the flood our entire carpet was soaked and I really didn't want to get rid of it, but we came to the conclusion that we needed to so we cut it up and threw it out. We only had two more walls to built before this happened. We didn't put up a lot of drywall and the ones we had on the floor didn't get wet which we were thankful for.
6) We had some friends come over and help us move some of our furniture so we could start cleaning things up. We borrowed some fans as well so things could start to dry.
7)Unfortunately, it decided to rain all week like a week or two weeks later and with the ground still wet our basement had no chance. It flooded again and we already had lots of things off of the floor, but the only piece of carpet that was left in the computer room was absolutely soaked.
8) We decided that we needed to install a second sump pump so we purchased all of the materials and we have a friend that knows how to install it so he helped Gary do it. We also had some other people come throughout the day to help them out. It literally took them ALL day to install it. They were so tired by the end of the day. I'm so thankful that we installed it even though it was so expensive.
9) After this whole ordeal we took a break for a week and now we are continuing working on the basement.
10) I am very motivated to get this done and I hope that we will be able to get up all the drywall by the end of the month. Fingers crossed!
11) Our ward participated in a service day and there were two locations where they needed service. We decided to help clean up the Anacostia river at a park. We got to wear yellow "Mormon Hands" vests which were cool. I wanted to keep them, but they took them back. :( We got to go in canoe's and pick up the trash. It was actually lots of fun! Gary and I made a game out of it and decided to see how many tennis balls we could collect. I think we managed to get 7.
Dirty business!
Look at all that water!
Yay!
Our friend Jerry who helped all day!
The whole group!
Nice shot of the logo there.
Look at all the trash we collected!
There were more turtles on the log, but we scared them off. :(
Not the best picture...
All of the garbage that was collected.