The Flood

Last week on Wednesday Feb. 24th I woke up and thought to myself, "The house seems super cold, I wonder if Al has decided we need to save more on the heating bill and turned the heat down." I didn't think much more of it, and got myself off to work in a hurry. Al called me at work later that morning and said we had 3-4 inches of standing water in the basement! Our sump pump had somehow shut off. He had already gone down there and was able to restart the sump pump which slowly drained the water, but it had gotten high enough to flood the furnace electronics board. We spent the next few nights in our hats, coats, scarfs, and gloves until we were able to get approval from the insurance company to cover a new furnace. The heating guys were awesome we must say! We didn't call them with the approval until about 4:00 on Friday afternoon, but because we told them it was a brisk 48 degrees in the house and would remain so all weekend if they didn't come help, they did the overtime and brought 3 or four vans of tools and workers to retrofit our new furnace to our old pipes. The next day is was a steamy 75 degrees in our house all day until we finally realized our new thermostat was somehow also on the fritz. So they came out again on Sunday afternoon to give us a temporary thermostat, which we are still using at this point. And happy to say our house now stays at a decent 69 degrees.
Thankfully we don't keep much in the basement, we mostly use it for storage. Also most of it is on shelves or in plastic bags or totes, since there can be small water streams after lots and lots of rain. But we did still have some rugs, luggage, a TV, some paintings and odds and ends that are now ruined or mildewy. Thankfully the insurance company said they can have the washable stuff sent to a company that specializes in removing mold and mildew from clothes, etc. I think the one thing I'm most bummed about being ruined was a limited print lithograph of historic Rockville that my mom passed down to me:
Its probably actually a blessing that the furnace went out, otherwise we might not have found the water until it reached the second floor, or it could have sat there and stewed for a week, until we decided to go do some laundry. Plus it was an old furnace (maybe 10-15yrs old).