As are most Decembers, this was a crazy, full, fun. busy month! It's the last day of the year, so I'll be posting several things today to wrap up the year.
Before Christmas, my sister, Sarah, and her family came out. We spent the weekend at my parent's house having fun with them.
We went to the Bean Museum at BYU.
This is a bunch of the kids inside the elevator. Most of them automatically sat down as soon as the doors shut. It's more fun that way, I guess.
We had an impromptu snowball fight as we walked back to the cars.
As is the Porter family tradition, we drew parts, ran around the house to find costumes, and then acted out the Nativity story. Sam was a shepherd....
Some Wisemen and my mom taking pictures...
Later that night, Sam and Jared sat on either side of Jesse while he played some game on Joe's iPhone. I think they were like this for about an hour and a half.
Kendall left for Alabama for work and I headed home the next day. When I got home, I found that our entire basement had flooded! The carpet in about 90% of the basement was completely saturated with water. I made some calls and talked to Kendall and he made some calls. I had learned that this probably would not be covered on our insurance as it was caused by ground water. The weather was just right (or wrong) and the level of the ground water was super high. People's houses were flooding all over the valley. I also called a cleanup and restoration company to come clean everything up. About 10 minutes after I talked to Kendall on the phone, our neighbor and Elder's Quorum president showed up at the door. He looked around the basement to assess the situation and then began to call some guys to help get all of our furniture out of the basement. Before he even had a chance to call, the doorbell rang and there were 3 other neighbors at the door. Kendall had called them and they were there within minutes. I was so grateful! Those 4 men cleared all the furniture out of the basement into the garage so it was ready when ARS got there. THANK YOU! My next door neighbor took my 3 older boys to her house to play until my Mother in Law showed up and took them overnight. THANKS! ARS came in and ripped up all the carpet, threw out all the pads, sucked up as much water as possible and then put a bunch of fans all over the basement to dry the carpet and floors. Some random guy at Home Depot saw me looking for a sump pump and went all over the store finding the parts I needed to hook it to a garden hose. I didn't even ask. He just saw me looking at them and just started helping me. THANKS! I SO needed that. The next few days we just waited for everything to dry. The boys' Christmas presents were hidden in the crawl space and had been soaked. I had a fan on them to dry and then I had to tape boxes back together. The toys inside were all okay, but the boxes were pretty shabby looking. I don't even think they noticed though. :) After the carpets were dry, we had a guy come bring new pads and install the carpet. Then, Kendall's dad and bro and step bro helped us move everything back downstairs on Christmas. What a pain this all was! But, I also feel super grateful for all the help we received. I know Kendall was especially grateful while he was across the country and helpless. We learned a ton about what to do in a situation like this....now we know calling a restoration company is not the smartest move...expensive! We learned we could have just re carpeted the whole basement for way cheaper than we paid this company to come dry it out. Bummer! We were limited considering Kendall was out of town, however, so we just did what we could. We're working on getting the sump pump permanently installed to prevent this from happening ever again.
1 comment:
awwww I love Home Depot and nice neighbors! I'm glad your presents were able to make it out okay.
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