More on the water in our basement

Here are some pics of the past couple days.  Yesterday, I spent from 3am until about 10am de-watering the basement.  I didn't have a pump and it was all done with a shop vac.  I estimate that four inches in the basement of the tiny bungalow is roughly 1200 gallons of water.    

This is my daughter's "playroom".  We were able to salvage many of the toys by disinfecting them but a lot had to be thrown away.  It is not like she will suffer from a lack of toys though.  She has almost as much in her room, safe and dry, upstairs.

This is where I usually blog from.  I lost a lot of irreplaceable yet intangeable stuff like my portfolio (filled with drawings and photos that can't be replaced) as well as drawings for many projects I have worked on.  More disturbing are the piles of notes, books and other items that were lost.

This is what kills me.  Since I just finished a project, I had bags of "project parts" and misc. tools and stuff on the floor and in milk-crates and boxes.  It is all wet.  The tedious job of going through this will commence tomorrow.  

I got up bright and early today and by 6:00, had emptied a good part of the basement on to the back lawn.  My wife set up cleansing and rinsing stations as well as a place to photo everything in case we can get some of this covered by our insurance.  

While my wife was busy outside, I cut the basement carpet, that was beginning to smell and take on a life of its own, into neat rolls.  I think that the demo took about the same time as it took the guys to install it, except that I haven't taken out the nailing strips yet.  I think I'll leave that and some other demo to a contractor. One of the reasons I took this on was because it seems that due to the magnitude of the storm, the home services are all inundated with work and we haven't gotten a call back yet.  Waiting a few more days, as the smells built up, was not an option.  

I am really not sure what I am going to do next with the basement.  My head is still spinning and I am pretty upset about "losing" this one.  I'd like to get it fixed up soon but another part of me just doesn't have the energy to think about it. 

All of this has turned our upstairs into a sort of war zone.  It is insane.  Compounding the amount of "stuff" that was in the basement is the fact that we had just finished all our laundry and since we were going to be out all weekend, we had it all (and by "all", I mean pretty much every stitch of clothing we own) sitting in a giant pile on the basement floor.  Needless to say, the washing machine has been running overtime since 6:00am.  I think I might have only 2 or 3 loads left.  

So far, this is what we are throwing away.  I am staying home from work tomorrow to clean the remainder of the basement and to disinfect the tools.  I may have some help coming over for that one, which will make a big difference. I just hope the weather holds so I can use the yard as a staging ground again.