Strong, Capable Women

I debated between the title I used and "Water Woes." I am not great about focusing on the positive, so I'm going to try to do that more. And in this case, the positive is "Strong, Capable Women."

This morning Hilary called me at 7 a.m. to say that her basement had water in it and wondered what she should do. I knew that the key was getting the carpet dry as quickly as possible, so we started by bailing water out of the window well where it was coming in. (We got an inch of rain yesterday in Spanish Fork, and probably another inch since I saw that on the news! Turns out her neighbor's rain gutter extension was pointing right at her patio, which led to the window well. Ugh!)

Fortunately my parents had a pump we could use toward the end of our pumping. My mom dropped it off in perfect time since we had just decided our bucket wasn't getting enough out.

After pumping out as much water as possible we set to work downstairs with a couple of shop vacs getting the carpet as dry as we could. Then we had to pull up the carpet and suck out more water. We ended up not trying to save the foam pad since it was too wet (and therefore heavy!) so we cut it out and took it out to the garbage can. Then we got the carpets up and put fans on them to try to dry them out.

Here's the amazing part -- we did it with just the two of us. Okay, we did call my mom and dad for advice, but the actual doing it we did ourselves. I would have never thought the two of us could do it -- we've never done anything like that before. In fact, I'd prefer to leave it to the men as much as possible. :) However, Hilary's man is out of town and mine was on his way to work, so we went ahead and did our best and succeeded.

Now those of you who knew the Palmer/Ross duo would have no problems accepting that we are strong, capable women. However, if you were to ask the Brown/Roberts duo we may not be so sure. Kids have a way of wearing you down and making you feel weak and incapable. But Hil, WE did it!!! I guess we do have a little kick left in us after all ... I didn't doubt you did since you run a household almost single-handedly. However, now that we know, could you keep the water out of your basement so we don't have to do that again? ;)