Weathering the storm

Damn you, Irene, you homewrecking bitch.

Don't get me wrong -- the House of Bich made it through the storm in relatively fine form, and we're quite lucky.

But Irene sent me back to square one on the Super-Secret Basement Project! that I'd managed to keep from Rich's eyes.

It's no longer secret (and -- confession -- it was only secret because I once again waited for Rich to leave town to engage the services of 1-800-GOT JUNK; I love those guys), and in fact, he had to see it at its worst and start the cleaning process.

However, Rich was quite happy that the Got Junk dudes took away the old refrigerator, old shelves, leftover pieces of cabinetry, and a lot of heavy junk items that had been just sitting down there gathering even more dust. 

Unfortunately, my dreams of getting the project done for $1,000 or less are now unreachable: We got four inches of water in the basement, though our stuff and our appliances made it out fine. (The shelves and plastic tubs I bought to organize what I kept did that job.)

We are also the new owners of a sump pump. And we have two friends' Shop-Vacs in our basement. We've done a lot of cleaning. I've done a lot of re-stripping already, thanks to the moisture that seeped in from a record-August's-worth of rain in the soil.

Here, video of the morning after:

And a few pictures from about six weeks ago, though I'd done more work before Irene:

Here was our street at about 8:30 a.m. on Sunday morning (boy, I'm so happy we took those trees out):

And the backyard:

 Yes, I managed to take the hanging plants down and save my hydrangeas:

More of the basement and what greeted me when I woke after a couple hours of sleep:

Almost-funny story: I went downstairs at about midnight during the storm and saw a few rivulets coming from under one of the windows, and a little water seeping through a crack in the wall. I could have cleaned it up with a few paper towels, but I got worried anyway and threw down some old dropcloths and a couple of towels. On Sunday morning, the dropcloths were floating.

My Wellies came in handy.

Just a few hours later, the waters from a river tributary behind our poor neighbors' houses -- the one directly across from us had been pumping since midnight -- had receded:

And come September, we'll be reseeding the lawn; I recently killed all the grass, weeds and crabgrass that had taken over.