Our Second Anniversary

Last week we quietly celebrated 2 years in the Shively House. It has been busy, as I think you can surmise. I am glad to have this happy reason to add another post since most of the past few months has been dreadful.

On August 4 the basement was flooded with sewage backup from the overwhelmed rain & sanitary combo sewage system. We got about 6 inches of rain in only a few hours and nearly the whole city was covered in sewage. I waded thru nearly 2 feet of crap to carry out as much from the basement as I could. The rest we toted out on a nice sunny day the following weekend and washed the heck out of it. It was pretty bad and we still have not restored the walls of our basement.

Below you can see the street in front of our house, that car in the distance is covered to its hood by water.



Just in time for Halloween, the bats came back ... so ... we got all marvel comics on them and >>POW<< •• >>BAM<< got them outta here ... again. So far no signs, but were watching like hawks.

Which, by the way, we have those beauties in droves. Here is a photo of one of them during a rainstorm, sitting in the driveway. He's a young Coopers Hawk that I caught on video taking a bath in that puddle. He was having a great time, but the video is too big for me to post right now.



As the final stage of our long-drawn-out saga of the basement flood we cleared out one side of the basement today where the drywall needs to be rehung. We also cut out a doorway under the stairs to reconnect the 2 halves of the basement (there is a non-structural wall segment that creates 2 rooms in the basement, one raw and cellar-like where I can repair stuff and woodworking and the other, semi finished by the previous owners as a playroom.) We also started vacuuming out the foundation room under the sun room that we restored this past winter. There has been a slow little leak that sometimes shows up in that room, right under where the back door is. As we vacuumed and moved some insulation out of the way it became perfectly clear that the little leak has been going on for quite some time and the wood in that area was like a crispy wet sponge.

We dug out the crowbar and a hammer and screwdriver to dig at the old wood and vacuumed till we were choking on the dust from the shop vac. It was horrible. I got aditional lights. I got hit in the head several times by the shop vac hose. We breathed dirt and fiberglass. We finally cleared alot out and saw that some serious damage had occurred. We filled in the gaps we just made with chunks of wood and expanding spray foam (we love that stuff) till we can get the repairs made properly.

Now we need to figure out what is really needed, get that master bed room painted that we begain in March of 2009, do the repairs to the structure of the house in the basement, or rehang drywall. This is exactly why nothing ever seems to get done ... even after 2 years.