When the levee breaks

Sorry this post took so long to go up... Blogger has been down for the past day or two. 

We had a bit of excitement last night in our normally uneventful life thanks to a large amount of rain and a small amount of roof.  Heavy rain was expected yesterday but the roof over the new back of the house isn't complete yet.  And in order to build the new roof shape they needed to tear off the back side of the original attic and the ceiling of the upstairs bathroom.  Larry told us yesterday morning that if they started on the roof that day it was likely that they wouldn't be able to finish so there was a chance we'd get some water in the house.  Figuring we could handle a little dripping here and there, we told him to go ahead with the roof so we could keep things moving.  And he was right... we did get some water:

More details and pictures after the fold...

Larry and the boys put in an extra long day yesterday to build out as much of the new roof as possible to cover up the new addition, and really made a ton of progress (I'll put up some pictures of that in a later post).  But even with all that, the upstairs bathroom was completely open to the outside. So you'd think that if we got a huge rainstorm, we'd end up with a ton of water in there from the wind blowing it sideways under the partial roof, into the attic, and down into the bathroom. But surprisingly, we got very little up there - once we closed the bathroom door to cut off the cross-breeze from the attic through the hallway and out through the front bedroom, we got almost nothing.  The real problem was in the kitchen.

Nearly the entire house has been straightened and supported and leveled with new joists and poles with the exception of underneath the upstairs bathroom since Larry's been holding off on that for now to keep it usable for us.  That's not really an issue for us right now, but it does cause a slight dip in the second floor right where the new floor meets the back wall of the bathroom.  The subfloor on the second floor addition (the master bedroom) is complete, which is good from a progress viewpoint but bad because it gave the water a place to collect and sit.  But since that floor isn't totally level yet due to the dip near the bathroom, all of the water from the entire master bedroom surface funneled down into a single point.  It was pretty much the same conditions that can cause flash floods.

The temporary kitchen got completely soaked, but fortunately nothing was damaged that wasn't going to be replaced as part of the construction anyway.  Things could have been much worse.  Larry's hoping to get most of the rest of the roof and sheeting done today, and he'll put up some plastic sheeting to better redirect the water away from the house for the next time it rains.  That's good news for us, since the weathermen are saying we'll be getting heavy thunderstorms for the next 4 days.

At first we tried to catch all of the water in big Tupperware containers, but we had no chance of keeping up with the water flow using things that small.

We also pulled the trash bag out of the bin and grabbed a big empty bucket from the basement... those worked a little better but were still missing a lot of the water.  The temporary laundry room seen in the back of this picture had a leak too, but it was much slower than the one in the kitchen and was mostly just flowing down into the basement so we ignored it.

Most of the water was coming down from just to the side of that light.  There had been lot of insulation up there to keep us from getting any cold air from outside over the last few months, but this storm washed it down into the kitchen.  Here you can see another big piece about to fall.

There is a slight grade in our temp kitchen since the floor under the 1st floor bathroom (on the other side of the wall from the fridge there) hasn't yet been fully reinforced, so after the water covered the floor of the temp kitchen it started running east towards the hallway and the front door.  Emily and I built up a levee system out of old towels to hold back the flood from the rest of the house and divert the flow down into the old heat/AC vent in the hallway floor.  From there it just ran out into the basement which fortunately is still filled with sand.

Taken after the storm had died down a bit.  The temp kitchen was left wet and dirty but fortunately the levee held and the rugs and couches and electronics in the living room (just to the left of the towels in this picture) were untouched.