Rain, rain...get out of my basement

What do you get when 25 mm of rain falls on a hell of a lot of snow in your backyard in a very short period of time?

A wet basement.

This morning, as I ran downstairs to grab something while the kids were eating breakfast, my foot did a sort of 'squish' as I stepped into the family room. 'Hmm,' I thought. 'That's not right.' So, after very little investigating, I discovered that my floor was wet under my carpet. And sadly it was wet in a very bad place. Because it was not wet in the corner of a room near an outside wall, but smack in the middle of my basement where the subfloor in the family room ends and the basement floor begins (all of which is covered by one carpet).

This meant just one thing. The water was seeping in from somewhere clear across the room and enough of it had seeped in that it had flowed under the subfloor in search of an exit -- where the subfloor ended. (The subfloor sits about 4 inches above the concrete floor in my family room. It's supposed to help make the room warmer because the carpet is not directly on the concrete.)

At this point, I did what anyone woman with no idea of how to fix anything would do. I called Ryan at work.

After cursing a few times, he got in the car and drove home from Mississauga. He spent about two hours working in the basement -- cutting the carpet to stop the flow of water, breaking apart the wood panelled wall in what he correctly guessed was the source of the leak and popping over to Home Depot to rent an industrial-sized fan to dry out our wet carpet.

When the lake in my backyard goes down, and the basement dries out we'll have to determine the extent of the damage and go from there. Hopefully, when everything dries, the damage will be minor.

I think I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Oh the joys of home ownership.