There are two very important things that I think I forgot to mention when I wrote this post the other day.
The first one is the fact that not only did I wake up and decide to go back asleep instead of checking the basement, but 
I really wish at least one of us would have done something. Even if it meant we spent all night bailing water, we might have been able to avoid the flooding.
The second important thing I forgot to mention is what we did upon finding the water that we absolutely should not have done. We both went charging into the water to try and figure out what was going on. We are very lucky that neither of us got electrocuted! The water could have very well been carrying electrical current from our power outlets and it is a miracle we were not injured.
As I mentioned in the other post, it was early morning when we had a restoration company on site starting to clean things up for us. As you can see from the photo above, Jovi took on the role of overseer to make sure they were doing all of the work properly.
Here is half of the stuff that we pulled out of the basement and moved to the garage to start going through.
This is the other half. All of my shoes were pretty much ruined except for one pair of black dress shoes. We had to run to the store this weekend and buy all new sneakers for me. All of my wife's scrapbooks that she had spent hours and love putting together were ruined.
We used a camera to take pictures of the pages before we threw them out. It was a very hard and emotional weekend. I also had to go through my vinyl collection and discard pretty much every single album jacket. I carefully wiped down the records themselves and hopefully they will not warp and will still be playable.
This is the only one of two records that came through the disaster unscathed.
The workers started raising up the large furniture that could not be moved out of the basement and placed dehumidifiers and air movers throughout the basement to start getting things dried out.
The project lead for our job let us know that they would be using a lot of electricity to get everything dry. They actually had an electrician come later in first day of recovery to hard-wire all of their equipment into our electrical panel.
I am not looking forward to seeing what that bill is going to look like when it comes in the mail.
Going through this has been pretty horrible and
The problem is the workers can't give you a timeline because it all just depends on how dry things are. They try to get the moisture level down to 14% because at that point mold can not grow. If it takes three days or three weeks to get there, that is just how long it takes.
Probably the most unfortunate thing (besides losing our stuff), is the smell. The smell is just horrible. Since our house is a bi-level, the basement is pretty much just an extension of the house. It isn't a door'ed off area with a long staircase heading down that you can just block off and leave the mess "out of sight, out of mind".
When you come into the house you either go up a small staircase to the upstairs, or down a small staircase to the lower area. We have been keeping the windows open 24/7 and burning candles just to mitigate the smell.
More on that in the next post though....