They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I can give you both. Here’s a shot of the basement a week after a sewer crew fountained Herself’s crapper, ruining carpet, vinyl flooring, drywall and my sunny disposition. The outfit hired to handle the cleanup and restoration is on the job, and God willing (and the toilet don’t rise) we should have a functional garden-level basement once again sometime by, oh, I dunno, the 2010 Tour de France. Maybe.
This is a small house, just 1,300 square feet, and it gets a lot smaller when you don’t have full use of that basement, which housed Herself’s office, bathroom and walk-in closet, the washer-dryer combo’ and the cats’ litter box. We’re both working upstairs now — Herself on a Dell Latitude at the kitchen table, and me on a MacBook in the living room, because the dehumidifiers kept tripping breakers and crashing my office. We’re doing a load of laundry for the first time in a week. And we’re down to one toilet, which makes mornings interesting:
“I need to take a shower!”
“Well, I need to take a shit!”
And so on.
We kept the cats upstairs while things dried out downstairs, which was an exercise in sleep deprivation. After a couple too many early risings I took to waking up Turk’ and Mia whenever I caught them napping during the day, purely out of vengeance. “Big Man don’t sleep, don’t nobody sleep!” I’d growl. Everyone got cranky, even Herself, who is ordinarily the acme of sunniness. Finally we settled on locking the cats up in my office at night. What the hell, I thought, if I can’t use it as an office, it might as well serve as a feline penitentiary.
Throw in a couple extra shifts at VeloNews.com during the Amgen Tour of California, a wine rack full of bottles and a closet full of firearms and you have a recipe for headlines. Happily, so far we’ve avoided the mainstream media. But the wind is howling like a banshee now and my skull is throbbing like a Harley Fat Boy, so all bets are off.
Mad Blog Media 
The wind is going to drive me crazy as well. I’ve been working on bikes all day in my basement, but I can still hear it out there. Sandhya was almost blown over riding her bike home from school today.
But hey, it is still pushing 55 degrees in February at 6000 feet. I’m just glad I’m not having to combat ice and snow (and, tangentially, shit in the basement).
“it gets a lot smaller when you don’t have full use of the basement…” I wish I had a basement. I dream of having a basement some day to double the size of my house. Houses in Texas have no basements and I’ve always been envious of those have them – such a great idea. Not that I want one full of sewer water mind you…
Thoreau once said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Yours is loud.
Dude, Those dehumidifiers draw probably 10 amps apiece, so you might try separate circuits for them. We all like the cat treatment. The household here(one couple, two teenagers, two cats) does similar stuff for similar reasons to the cats, and they strike back by using our feet as play toys at night. For the bathrooms, well, you’ve been living in luxury. Two bathrooms and two people? One teenager requires the equivalent of three bathrooms, so think of our plight. I get up early just so I can shower before the teenagers wake up and use up all the hot water. Not just ours but the neighbors on either side of us.