Yikes! It's Ike!

This is a super long post. Sorry. Feel free to just look at pictures and get the idea. ;)

Michigan is no where near an ocean, so I haven't spent a lot of energy worrying about hurricanes. Perhaps I should have...

It rained all day yesterday. And when I say 'all day' what I mean is there wasn't a minute that it wasn't raining from when I woke up until 11 pm. Granted, I wasn't looking out the window all of those hours, so you'll have to take my word for it. Today is much the same. Constant rain. It hasn't always been a hard rain, though it does have its moments. But it has been sprinkling, raining, or pouring for 2 days now.

And now you are all dying to know how our basement is doing after last year and this year's flooding. (Don't worry Natalie! As soon as we hear the alarm go off, we'll get all of your stuff upstairs!)

To give you a little background, our basement was flooded when we bought it as a foreclosure. We had a double sump pump, and a water guard system installed. But then there was a storm last year that completely overwhelmed the system. There was a lake in our yard from the porch out to the trees. The sump pump just kept pumping into the backyard, which kept running into the basement. Obviously something had to change.

We spent countless hours and dollars putting in undergroud pipes. We have a large one (we are talking a foot diameter here) put at the bottom of a 60 ft long ditch. We then covered the pipe with rocks, so we wouldn't just have a huge ditch in the backyard. We connected all of the rain gutters and the sump pump to pipes that run out to the large pipe in the backyard. Then we built a berm (a small hill) so that the water wouldn't run into the yard once the ditch filled.

We didn't quite get the berm done in time, and a good sized storm that filled the ditch and came through our hole in the berm. We finished the berm and thought we were in good shape. We were wrong.

The next storm did great at keeping the water on the other side of the berm, but there was still tons of water on our side of the berm, with no way to get to the other side. Our next idea was to put a sump pump in the yard and run it into the ditch as well. It would have worked great last week, had Brad finished getting the electricity run out to it. Sigh.

Therefore, this is our first test of our new system. If this doesn't work, I honestly don't know what else we can do. At least there is an alarm on the basement system so we'll know before it starts to flood.

I have a couple of pictures on this blog, but if you want to see the slides, you'll have to log into the cookie blog. There are lots and lots. I took some originally, because I thought the water was so high, but it just kept getting higher and higher and higher, so there are multiple set of pictures.