Below is a live picture of one of the roads we take to get to our house. This picture is from a live feed which is cool, so we can watch what’s going on from our kitchen. I can’t find a before and after picture, but this is the road that flooded and the other road we normally take had high potential to flood yesterday, but thankfully it didn’t. The crazy thing is that it’s not even raining here today (Thursday). It rained a little the day before yesterday, but I guess the majority of the water comes from up the mountain and runs down past our little town creating an Island of our town. Apparently the water is the 3rd highest it’s ever been.
Yes, our kitchen is now our office because our bedroom flooded last Friday night! At one point that night Luke asked me if Alyssa had peed on the floor. She hadn’t and so as he was using a towel to dry up the mysterious wet spot he realized the small water spot seemed to be everlasting. We then realized there was another similar spot and then immediately started pulling up the carpet to realize we were floating in standing water.
We then proceeded to move our entire bedroom furniture into our front room! Good thing we didn’t really have furniture in there before! The only piece of furniture we had in there was the bookcase which you can see behind the baby bed. You can also see from the picture we are now sleeping next to a very large picture window. So when we wake up in the morning it’s like “Hello Neighbors!” Here is a before and after picture:
We called our neighbor and asked if he would help us pull up the carpet, etc. He happens to be a landscaper and so right away he knew how to stop the root of the problem. He showed up bright and early the next morning with an excavator and dug trenches around our entire house. And because he had the excavator he decided to go ahead and landscape our yard! I had no idea this excavator machine could do so much, but it dug trenches, moved boulders and was an amazing tool in helping us fix our drainage issues. Once the trenches were dug and the pipes were in we had a flowing river for hours from the back yard to the front yard drainage area because there was so much water in the ground!
Here’s a picture time line:
Friday morning: “Oh cool a pond, let’s buy some fish!” That window in the picture is our bedroom window.
Friday night: “Pee spot! – Yeah right!” yikes.
Saturday morning 8am: Digging up the backyard. Oh yeah and we had to take out our deck.
I took mostly video, but here are 2 pictures a friend took…I’ll try to get better copies. You can see the muddy water flowing from the back to the front of the house. We had 4 neighbors come by and help us as well as 2 friends from church. Everyone was covered in mud when they went home!
Saturday 5pm: Trenches dug, pipes in, deck destroyed
I took this picture today, so as you can tell most of the flowing water is gone from the ditch.
Here is a picture of the "landscaped yard.” Our neighbor gave us all of those plants and that tree is one of those pink flower trees. I’ve never seen one in California, so I’ll send pictures when it blooms in the spring. He put in two flat stones to go from the porch to the “grass area.” The grass area will be where all the mud is! :) It’s hard to tell from this picture, but it’s going to look really nice when we’re done.
Monday morning: Big Super Expensive Fans!
Thursday morning: Demolition of the bedroom…can you see that there was no insulation in part of the wall! It opened up right to the crawl space underneath the house!
Friday afternoon (today): Big Dump Truck!
Lots and lots of rocks! Alyssa loves rocks.
Below a picture of the rock pile after Luke took 6 loads to the back of the house! I think we might need some help!
I took lots of video last Saturday, so as soon as we get it edited I’ll post it. :) But I think you get a pretty good idea of the craziness we’ve been through this past week!