The basement is dry. Sometime after the sun came up I bought a window well cover at the local hardware store. Then I returned it, went into town and bought one that fit. It’s just crammed up between two vinyl siding panels for now because I’m too tired to trust myself to secure it to the house without doing exactly the wrong thing. Barring heavy winds, it should stay put and do its job just fine. We’re expecting it to rain for the rest of the week.

It’s one a.m. and we are experiencing our first basement flood. We were lucky. Two hours ago we looked out the window to see a stream running past our house where the street used to be. We only have one tiny window in the whole basement and a 10 year flood warranty on a 3 year old house, so I wasn’t really worried. Silly me. Luckily, Mym decided to check the basement anyway and wandered up to the window just as the window well reached critical mass and the water started seeping in. We grabs rags and shored up the window long enough to throw the few pieces of furniture and boxes out of range. I started wringing into a bucket as quickly as I could, but it was coming in too fast, so Mym went outside with a pitcher to bail from the other side, too. It was touch and go for a while. A little bit got away from us and ran down the back of the wall to seep out onto the floor, but it didn’t get far. Once we managed to get ahead of it enough to slap a board over the window well to keep the rain out, we thought we were in the clear, but the ground was so saturated that it was coming up from underneath, too. It wasn’t as fast, but it was still enough of a problem that Mym had to go back out and bail a couple more times before I finally got a siphon going into a five gallon bucket and drained it down to the rocks. It filled the bucket completely.

The rain has slacked off a bit and the rocks are still exposed. If the storm heads East, we should be fine. If it turns South, I’m gonna need a bigger bucket.