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Here is Chad. He replaced Kent as favorite uncle in a matter of hours. He is living with us for a little while, testing the waters in Seattle. He and Eric have been working upstairs, creating a room out of the storage space next to Ridge's room. To the side of this picture you can see the sawsAll cutting through the wall.
Yup, there is now a gaping hole in Ridge's room. It will be a really fun space once it is finished. And this is the first time Eric has stayed on schedule with a home project. It has helped that he has had someone to work with, he and Chad spent all of Saturday hanging drywall. We're going to hire someone else to finish the messy part of it. Then Ridge will have his room back, Chad will have his own space, and Cannon won't have to share his room with Ridge. The project has taken a back seat for a few days though because we had another adventure this week in the cellar.
You might have heard of the torrential rains and flooding in the Seattle area. Our area wasn't bad at all compared to the pictures on the news, but we did get 2 feet of water in our basement, and it would have been more had Eric not had access to pumps. The above picture is of some of our food storage sailing around in the murky mess. Our neighbor came over to see if our house was okay since theirs had some flooding. I knew our backyard was completely saturated but I didn't think of looking in the cellar since we do have some ground pumps in there. About an hour later the heater turned on and I noticed a weird smoky smell so I sent Chad to look in the cellar and he reported a foot of water that quickly kept rising.
And this picture is of an old freezer that is down there that also got to float around a bit. The water is all pumped out but there is still water leaking in. It seems that our basement is collecting the runoff from all of the neighbors around here. Eric has been hard at work trying to clear it out. He came home early yesterday to fight the mess and then spent this evening at it again. He was able to get the hot water heater working, it lives down there next to the furnace which, unfortunately, has he has not been able to bring back to life yet. I was going to call Torrie tonight and beg to take a shower at their house tonight but that wasn't necessary after all. Someone will come look at it tomorrow and hopefully be able to repair it. We have a couple of oil heaters, one in our room and one in upstairs in the boys' room. Laine's room is freezing so she and Sommer are in our room for a few nights. I'm thankful for a husband who just gets to work and fixes things. I know I complain about having the same troubles as the shoemaker's wife, but I know that it is a blessing that Eric is so handy around the house.