Flooding - Round 2

The day we moved into our new home it flooded.  It was not super fun.  But things happen and it got cleaned up and fixed and we moved on with it being a memory.  

That is...until Sunday.  

We have 9:00 AM church and sometime between then and noon it started to rain hard here in Idaho Falls.  We came home from church and I started making lunch and Mark said he was going to go downstairs and check the storage room to make sure no water was coming through.  

Side note - we have a dry storage room and then through that a separate door that goes to a cold storage room.  This room is cement and under our front porch and has a small vent in the top corner.  We have never understood the purpose of this vent but have since been told it's to help with condensation.  We've noticed that sometimes snow would blow in through the vent (not really a big deal) but for that reason Mark wanted to go down and just make sure nothing was happening.  This was also the source of where the flooding came into the house when we moved in.  Needless to say, we don't trust this section of our home.  

All of a sudden, Mark comes rushing upstairs telling me that we are flooding again and runs outside to try and stop the water.  I run downstairs and start to move everything out of the storage rooms.  The cruddy thing about this time was that (unlike last time when it was clean pipe water plus there was nothing in the house yet) this is muddy, buggy, dirty water.  It was nasty.  Luckily, most of what we had in our storage room were in big plastic containers and so were protected that way.  However, we did have a few boxes of books and scrapbooks.  Thankfully, nothing was really "ruined" just some bubbly edges.  

Mark dug a small trench to get the water to drain out into the yard and away from the vent and so luckily stopped the water from continuing to come in pretty quick.  In the back corner of the cold storage room there was probably a good 2 to 2 1/2 inches of dirty water and then varying amounts everywhere else.  

On the side of the vent Mark noticed a small hole on the bottom that was allowing the water to go straight down.  This is what it looked like after Mark dug the trench letting it come out.  

The cold storage room where the water was coming in.

Our "dry" storage room - which had the most damage.  It also went beyond this room into an unfinished bedroom but there was nothing in that room to cause any damage.  And luckily had not yet reached the carpet.  

Luckily, our neighbors had a shop vac and we were able to suck up the water pretty quick with that and then got some fans going.  

Once everything settled down and we ate lunch finally and put the kids down to bed, Mark and I were frustrated.  We felt like we had been deceived.  We hadn't done anything to the vent - hadn't even touched it.  So either this was a problem every time it rained and we were never told or it didn't get fixed properly when it flooded the day we moved in and now we are paying the price.  It was really frustrating.  

When we first were putting in our offer for this home we noticed that there had been some flooding damage before.  It was a red flag for us.  When we pushed the matter they assured us that it was while the house was being built and it hadn't been properly graded yet and so the problem was now fixed.  We were concerned this time because that was a red flag for us and now we are worried that we have been in this home only three months and had two separate flooding instances that we will now have to report on and that means three red flags when we try and sell it.  Boo...for a couple hours we were definitely not happy campers.  

It grew increasingly apparent to us though how many tender mercies there were in this incident.  The biggest one being that Mark was home.  Considering that is not the case 80% of the time, this was a huge blessing.  There is no way if I had been home alone with the kids that I would have had the time or even thought about going down and checking the storage rooms.  And I am sure it wouldn't have hit the carpet yet when I would have taken Jacob downstairs for naps and so it would have been hours before I would go down there again.  Plus, then I just wouldn't have even known where to begin and the damage would have been so much worse.  

The fact that it didn't reach the carpet is yet another tender mercy.  That would have upped the damage by so much.  We feel so blessed that it didn't happen a week ago when we were on our trip and I don't even want to think about how badly the damage could have been then.  So many things to be grateful for. 

So when all is said and done everything is fine.  It was still frustrating but we acknowledge that it could have been so much worse.  Now we just need to figure out some permanent solution to the problem (other than our current muddy trench) and hopefully we will no longer have any flooding problems.  

What a day.