The Cleanup BEFORE The Flood

It was time. I had been putting it off for some time. I certainly couldn't use it, that's for sure. Meet, my sewing table.

Somehow, someway, my table became a catch-all....a catch-all that "caught all" fairly quickly too. With that being said, I am throwing caution to the wind and I have decided to be brutally honest here. The photo you are about to see is where I was supposed to create things. Instead, I hit a brick wall each time I walked by the table. Something definitely had to be done....

Before:
A real mess that was slowly, but surely growing.....

After:

A might better I would say. There is still too much clutter on the table but I can see that there is a table. (Don't look at the pattern sticking in my "to do" box, Janette!) I even vacuumed afterwards! I threw away 2-30 gallon trash bags of , uhm, well, trash and precious cloth scraps that I had been holding on to for far too long! A couple of weeks ago, I made the curtains you see in the photo and all that the room needs now is a fresh coat of paint. Now if I could figure out how to keep little kiddos from drawing on my rotary cutting mat in INK!

OK, that was the cleaning part. Now comes the flood part.

We are accustomed to having to call for emergency services from time to time since we live near a busy intersection but nothing prepared us for what happened the other night.

Imagine Scott and I sitting on the couch, trying to watch LOST. Then, the familiar sound of a car crash broke our concentration from figuring out what year Kate and Jack were actually in this time. We walked out on the porch, scanned the yard to see where a car landed this time. This time, it was two houses away and we saw sparks flying in the distance....or what we thought were sparks flying.

As it turned out, when a car runs over a fire hydrant, at night, the car lights reflect on the cascading water and give the appearance of sparks. (Oh, and just to let you know, the person was not injured in the car accident)

To make a long story short, here are some scenes from that night:


This was the beginning of our "flood" experience. Believe me, it is very sobering to suddenly see a river of water rushing towards your front door.

Here is the water just touching the siding on the front of the house.

We watched helplessly as the water rose and rose, closer to the top of the foundation of the house. At one point, I pulled the couch out from the wall to see if the water was coming in. Thankfully, it didn't.


It's hard to tell, but this is a river of water that was washing down one side of the house.


Here is the threshold of the basement door. Notice the water pouring out of "Mr. Slither's" escape hatch. (Mr. Slithers is the black snake that I'm petrified of, that lives in the basement and leaves his skin lying around in my path each summer)

This is a photo of just after the water slowed down (thank you Mr. Water Company Employee)

Almost a foot of dirt was washed away from this side of the driveway. The gravel came from across the road somewhere....

This used to be full of mulch if you can believe it. Now the mulch is long gone. you don't even see it in the back yard- it washed down the hill, through the woods, and into a local stream.

Here is the far side of the house where the water rushed down and uncovered the downspout from the gutter. There is still some mulch here but we have a nice little ditch there now that wasn't there before.

Overall, I had no idea that millions of gallons of water could flow that quickly from a fire hydrant. I also learned that, (thank goodness) a water company employee lives fairly close to my house.


Something tells me that we will be hauling mulch in the near future.....