To put it lightly this has been one crazy week. Our basement flooded Three Times this week. The first was on Sunday night and we found it Monday morning. It was pretty awesome because Matt woke up around 5:30, went downstairs to get dressed and found we had flooded throughout the whole basement. Keep in mind our basement is finished with a fair amount of carpet. At that point Matt woke me up told me we had flooded and left to go to work while I cleaned up the mess. Thank goodness for good friends who helped me with Carter while I did the monotonous work of soaking up water out of carpets. I worked all day into the night Monday and Tuesday and by Tuesday night Matt and I were feeling pretty confident that we had cleaned it up as well as we could. I took a break on Wednesday and gave Carter some attention since he had been totally neglected the past couple of days. Then Thursday morning starting around seven a.m our house started shaking and continued to do so for an hour from an intense lightening and thunder storm. Just to put things into perspective, we live at the top of a pretty high hill and the lightening was striking right above our house, hence the shaking. So about 20 minutes into it I go check our basement and sure enough water is coming into our basement from all directions and way too fast for me to suck it up on my own. I called one of my girl friends who called two other of our friends and within 10 mintues I had tons of help and towels to get our house under control. I couldn't believe how efficient and helpful these women were. Thank goodness for friends! So for the second time we had our house under control. But the bad news was the news was saying we were just hours away from another horrible storm. I paged Matt and told him he had to get home now to help me prepare for the next hit. By the way, by this time our basement was completely torn up and our carpet pulled out. So Matt got home and we made a couple preparations hoping to keep some of the water out, but sure enough water came gushing in once again. Our whole county was declared to be under a state of emergency and some towns were even"washed away" in sludge and sewage.
But yesterday we worked like dogs all day long and finally finished around midnight and now our basement is put all back to order except we haven't gotten our carpet reinstalled we just laid it back down. My biggest concern now is mold, but we've taken some precautions and I will try to watch everything like a hawk. Mold and water damage is a big concern here in Pittsburgh because everything is so old, I just hope I can keep ours to a minimum. Also, I kept thinking I needed to take pictures, but of course at midnight last night after I had just finished scrubbing everything down I realized I hadn't. Bummer.
It's funny how certain things have to happen in order to make things feel official. For me having a real family photo taken made it finally official that yes we do have a family of three now. So everyone I am proud to introduce the Official Nielsen family to you: Matt, Amber and Carter Nielsen!!
