Week of June 14th-Please...Let it stop Raining!

Seriously, it's been raining for days, weeks even.  My youth league games have been rained out 3 times in a row!  I can deal with that, what I can't deal with is rain in my parents basement! 

This has been the focus of the week as they are in Hawaii celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary!  35 years of marriage, just amazing. So needless to say, we are not wanting to call them and tell them they now own a houseboat and all our childhood memories are floating around their basement. We think that might just ruin their vacation.   The first round of flood looked like this:

These photos are actually a bit after the initial water started draining.  There was 11 inches all the way across about 1500 sq feet!  That's a ton of water.  Apparently the sump pump shook itself silly which ended up making it stop working. 

We got all this drained on Monday.  Tuesday morning my BIL went over at 5am b/c he was worried. Sure enough, another 6 inches were back!  The sump pump got stuck again.  Finally we determined assistance was needed and we called our grandpa, swore him to secrecy so he wouldn't call my dad, and got his advice.  He informed of us the issue and my sister rigged up the fix to make it unable to vibrate into disfunction again!  So far so good, but as you can imagine, the place stinks to high heaven. We have been over there every night, mopping, cleaning, throwing out treasured memories etc.  This is post final flood. Working on getting the couches back in place now that they've dried out.

You know those people that get joy from cleaning?  I'm not one of them, cleaning sucks.  You have to touch gross stuff, there's bad smells, takes forever, ect.  However, cleaning for my parents so they are not super sad when they get home, really didn't suck at all. It was hot and smelly and tiring, but totally worth every painstaking second.