Stupid Rain!

While the rain has helped my garden grow and minimized my allergies it has also caused me much grief. The Sugar Factory Playhouse is literally an old Sugar Factory. Back stage is outside, so when it rains not only can the audience hear it pounding on the factory but the actors have to hide out in the hot dressing rooms to avoid getting soaked. So I wasn't loving the rain but it got worse...

Because of the play I had switched my work schedule a little. While at work on June 11th I got a call from my sister-in-law Crystal. She started out asking me if it had rained at my work. It had, in fact it had gotten so bad that my boss asked me to turn off the computer for fear that it would crash. Then she proceeded to tell me that Max went downstairs for a toy and found a sopping wet carpet. Now for those of you keeping tabs on us, you may remember that last summer Max and Logan (my nephew) thought it would be fun to put the hose in our furnace vent. $1500.00 later we had new carpet and fortunately not a new furnace. Steven and I have been trying to get out of debt for a while now and we now see the light at the end of the tunnel so as you can imagine we were not thrilled about the prospect of having to buy new carpet again in the same month we had planned to pay off last years new carpet.

So...I came home and sure enough the carpet was soaked. Steven came home and together we moved furniture, used a neighbors wet/dry vac and tore up some of the carpet. Everyone kept telling me that it came in through the window but I was skeptical because the paint hadn't gotten wet but we proceeded to clean up as if that was the case. Steven returned to work and I continued to run the wet/dry vac. Once the vacuum had shocked me twice I decided to stop and blog about my frustrations. I took pictures of everything and thought it would be good therapy until I discovered that I couldn't get my photos off my camera. Grrr... But now it is working so here is a peak at what my house looked like.
I put the kids mattresses in the front room for them to sleep in and then went to rehearsal while my mom watched the kids and Steven worked late. The next morning I was pleased to find that the floor was completley dry! Hooray. After my shower I went back in to rearange some things and the floor was wet again! We called someone in to look at it and found out that it WAS coming in through the window but it wasn't running down the wall. The dirt level in the window well was too high so when it rained the water would soak in through the window. There is a crack on the window sill so the water was going through that, running down the concreate and seeping up through the carpet.

So here is how we fix it.

• dig out 2 feet of dirt in the window well and replace that dirt with gravel but don't fill it all the way to the top. (DONE as of yesturday)
• Tear up the carpet & Padding and put it out in the sun to dry. Well thanks to the rain it just sat in the garage to dry. (DONE)
  
• Cut out the damaged Dry wall (DONE) Max LOVED this part!

• Repair the Dry wall (1st coat DONE)
• Have the neighbor who installs carpet tell us if we can save our carpet (Not done, he is out of town)
• Have our neighbor reinstall our carpet and pad or buy new and have it done. (Not done)
  
• Put our house back together again. (Not done)

So now you know where we currently stand in our flood situation. Hopefully we can get the rest of it taken care of the first part of this week.