Beth mentioned last night that the trenches for our sprinklers would be dug today. Unfortunately, because of the rain we got over the past several days, our yard is pretty muddy. I called the trencher guy to see if he could still do it, and he said, “Well, if you sink an inch, my trenching machine will sink six inches.” I think he’s underestimating my size, but I get the point. So he will be coming on Saturday, instead. Bummer.

Oh, and as long as we’re talking about bad things that happened from this last rainstorm, our basement flooded again. Last spring, we had a problem caused by California Boy Jeff not knowing that you had to turn off the water to the sprinklers in the winter time. So the pipe froze and broke, and then when it thawed, it flooded our yard, which flooded our window-well, which flooded our basement. Well, this year I was smart, and I turned off the water for the winter. Unfortunately, when we fixed the pipe last year, apparently we jarred loose the caulking where the pipe goes into the house. So we had this rainstorm, which caused a puddle to form on the side of the house, right where there was a not-quite-blocked hole in the wall. Puddles being as they are, the water took the path of least resistance, which put it in the storage room in our basement.

There are three silver linings to this decidedly non-silver story:

1) After last year’s flood, we wisely decided to put everything in the storage room on 2x4s. That means that not much real stuff got wet, and nothing got ruined.
2) We had a couple big scraps of carpet that we threw down on the floor in the storage room, just so we wouldn’t have to walk on hard, cold concrete whenever we went into the room. These pieces of carpet probably saved us hundreds of dollars, because while THEY got soaked, they contained the flooding to the unfinished storage room, for the most part. There are a couple wet spots in the finished entryway, but by and large, the carpet saved the real rooms.
3) We probably needed to clean out the storage room and organize it a little bit, anyway. Beth just got back from Home Depot with a couple heavy-duty storage shelves, and if we end up with a clean, functional, pleasant storage room (with room for food storage), it will be hard to view this flood as a bad thing, in the long run.

So we have now had two floods in two years, and both of them were of the “it could have been a lot worse” variety. I was telling Beth how frustrating it is for me to be responsible for things I know nothing about (like basements and sprinklers and whatnot), but it’s part of being a homeowner. And we will still take the benefits of homeownership over the convenience of the alternative any day.