flooding

As you may already know, Stephanie and I have a rental property on the east side of Indy – we’ve had tenants there for the last two years and they’ve just now moved out, so we went over on Sunday to take a look at the house. The property manager had already done an inspection during the week and said there was some serious cleaning and painting and other stuff to be done, so we went over to assess what we wanted to do ourselves and what we should have them repair.

We walked all over the house lamenting how poorly the rental family had done taking care of the place and what we needed to do – we thought we’d let them clean, but attempt the painting ourselves. We’re still deciding on that; last time we did the painting, it took quite a while, and we want the house ready and back up for rent ASAP.

Then we went down in the basement. And we discovered 8 inches of water in the partially finished basement. It was bad. The water was high enough to cover the outlets. We went home and got our rain boots, and we called Stephanie’s dad, who drove down from Valpo with 2 pumps that we set up and started pumping water outside. Once we got the water level down we were able to wade over and see why the sump pump wasn’t working – it had been unplugged by the tenants. Not good. This was the result:

We managed to get the pump turned back on and between all 3 pumps, Stephanie and her dad got all the water out of the basement. (I had to go to bed so I could get up to pick up my rental car in the morning.) There is some work to be done on the water heater potentially, but the furnace is up and running.

We need to have some additional inspection I think, and we need to go over and truly clean stuff up. Lots of stuff in the basement that needs to get thrown out, and we need to get some de-humidifiers & fans going. Also, I’m making some instructional signs for the sump pump and for the washtubs that the washer and dryer drain into, which always seems to get clogged up.

We’ve had some crappy weather-related problems so far this year – I’m hoping that the rest of the year goes more smoothly.

I’m really concerned with how this will affect the next few weeks – I was looking forward to it getting warmer so I could spend time outside. I’ve been getting caught up on photo editing, so I’m ready to get back out to take photos. I have a bunch of work in our own yard to accomplish, and a bunch of writing to do, now that I finally feel like I have some sort of momentum going on the writing. And frankly, I’m worried about this chewing up all the money I got back from my tax refund and from my company bonus. I had some big plans for that money, and I hate to see it sucked into the rental house.