browser life

We had a lonnnng, cold winter. Cold as in minus 20 degrees at noon. Cold as in the fact that snow covered our yard from December 1st until yesterday.

The snow started melting last week, and the sump pump started going full time early this week. On Tuesday, Dan announced that the basement smelled like cat pee. I thought he was exaggerating since we don't have a cat and I didn't smell anything (kinda forgot that sometimes Sjogren's takes away my sense of smell).

Then on Friday after Dan came home from work and was talking to me in the basement while I was at the computer, he noticed that the stink was worse. I asked him to see where it seemed to be coming from since I still couldn't smell a thing. He went to the area where my scrapbook stuff is, and suddenly, his socks were all wet!

Yep, the basement had flooded! Ewwwwww! Dan wanted to have me call someone to come out and take care of it, but we are B-R-O-K-E, so I said we'd just have to rip out the wet carpet ourselves and see what we might be dealing with.

Dan called a friend to see if he could help. I meanwhile moved my scrapbook stuff into another room that was dry, which my back and shoulders did NOT appreciate. When our friend showed, luckily, he and Dan were able to get the carpet and pad up from the scrapbook area without too much trouble; I asked Dan to just cut the carpet at the entrance to the living area and said we'd deal with making it tidy later.

Good news is that I see no cracks in the floor at all. Bad news is MOLD!! It is along two walls as high as the tops of the baseboards.

We have no idea where the water is coming in, but we will have to get an answer to that before we do anything else. So I guess I will have to call someone to inspect, because even though we don't have cash for major work, we can even less afford further flooding. But I've never owned a home that flooded before and have no clue what sort of person or company handles that sort of thing.

And I've heard so many conflicting reports on what to do about mold that I am mystified. Will I really make it worse if I clean it myself? Are mold remediation companies rip-offs?

One thing I do know for sure: I'm not wasting any money putting down more carpet (the basement was fully carpeted when we bought it a year ago). Once we get the source of the leak figured out and the mold removed, I'm gonna have Dan buy the cheapest linoleum tile he can find and just slap it down so we can easily clean that area should we ever have another problem.

I wish I could just leave things the way they are. Once the carpet was removed and we ran a couple of box fans, the floor completely dried and has shown no further moisture even though it rained today. But I know I'm just asking for trouble if I don't get to the bottom of this.

Oh, and Dan had to spend most of a paycheck yesterday fixing his car again. Financially, I guess when it rains, it pours.

I don't like getting my feet wet.