Worst excuse EVER for having to clean the basement...

Well... on the bright side, we've been meaning to clean out the basement for a while... it seems two years of eBaying accumulates a lot of empty boxes.

However, when I'm not at home and I get a phone call from my wife saying "HOW DO YOU TURN OF THE WATER?!?!?! THE BASEMENT IS FLOODING!!!" - the first thought in my mind was NOT "Hey, finally we'll get to clean the basement out!"

Luckily I wasn't too far from home (and I apologize to everyone on 28th street at about 8:45 PM last night, who I passed doing about 90mph)... and I got home in about 5 minutes to rush downstairs and shut the water off. Unfortunately it wasn't something I could have conveyed on the phone to a panicked wife (and I will admit, I was in a bit of shock too)... although we learned a valuable lesson last night: The water shut-off is located by the laundry tub.

Nothing major was destroyed... just a lot of water. Cement floors have turned out to be a blessing in disguise. And thankfully, the Lab is safe... it only seeped in a little, so none of my collection was damaged.

The fault lays now with the plumbing company, who installed our new water heater back in June. It seems the connection between pipes they installed... came undone. How lovely. Hey - guess who will be paying my insurance deductible?

So I'm home today from work waiting for the plumber to come back and finalize the repairs (they came out last night and temporarily fixed it). Then insurance adjusters, blah blah blah... oh what fun.

We also had a company come out to spray mold inhibitor, set up a giant dehumidifier and a bunch of fans to dry out the baseboards, etc. They also hauled off all our soaked empty boxes... which was cool. Apparently, they also clean up "traumas," which is a nice word for "murder scenes." I told them that I would never call them for that type of work... but my wife may at some point. They didn't laugh. Oh well... I tried.