So, it’s two weeks since our flood.  We now have a bumper crop of mosquitos so its hard to do much out in the yard.  But that’s not too much of a problem because it’s beginning to feel like we spend every extra moment we have doing something related to cleaning up the basement.  There were a lot of people who had it worse off than we did.  I seriously feel for them, because I’m getting pretty sick and tired of taking care of our basement.

So we’re almost dry enough to start putting everything back together.  The contractor who finished out our basement the first time around — JDJ Builders — is helping us put it back together again.  I must admit, there were some things they did that I didn’t understand the reasoning for the first time around – like putting a 1″-2″ space between the block wall and studs for the room.  It has made it much easier to dry out the studs without ripping off all of the drywall.  So has their judicious choice of using pressure treated lumber for the frame out of the room.  It is turning out to be helpful in keeping the cost of rebuilding the room down.

Our water heater was flooded a little bit but it is still heating water so we thought we were okay even though it’s already 10 years old.  The plumber suggested we might want to replace it if it got flooded at that age.  So, we’re going to have him bid out a new 50-gallon high efficiency water heater as well as a tankless water heater.  He warned us that the tankless heater would be more expensive, but they save a lot of money in operating costs.  We’ll have to see how much different the bids turn out to be, but I’m leaning towards the tankless heater.  I read an article on being green that suggested the average household could save about $300 a year in gas costs.  That should make up the difference in a pretty short amount of time.

So, its been tiring and frustrating, but we’re getting back to normal kind of.  Around the time we go on our annual trek to the northwoods, we’ll finally have our house put all back together.