The Great Flood, V 2.0

After our big play day on Saturday, Sunday was a work day. We spent most of the afternoon working on organizing the garage. This garage is starting to seriously tick me off. For those not already in the know, the first great flood was last September after we moved. Kitty Daddy had been hauling boxes to a rented storage unit when he was commuting back and forth for the weekend before the kids and I moved. Then over Labor Day weekend we officially moved.

The apartment we are in has a chicken wire storage bin in the basement of the building and we also have a (nominally) one-car garage. When we moved in, the garage was all muddy and the previous tenants had left a bunch of broken furniture. We managed to get the furniture hauled away, but we wanted to clean the garage out before filling it with boxes. So we kept the storage unit for a couple of weeks and stowed a bunch of boxes in the basement bin.

One weekend, we hooked up a hose to the outside faucet and started spraying the mud out of the garage. Kitty Daddy was almost finished when the water went off. We went to investigate and the downstairs neighbors had turned the hose off because they had seen water running on the floor from under their basement bin. We investigated further and the pipe leading to the outdoor spigot had broken. Of course, said pipe was smack in the middle of the back wall of our storage bin, so it had been spraying directly into our boxes, then running across the floor through the neighbor's bin.

They had some water damage to stuff on the bottom of the pile, but nothing major. We, on the other hand, had a serious mess. The biggest loss was a full size mattress and box spring and the saddest loss was most of my childhood Little Golden books that I was getting ready to share with Bug and Bean. We also lost a bunch of miscellaneous stuff...some junk, some not so much so. And that was the first "flood."

Fast forward to this spring. When we started cleaning out the garage to go through the boxes and sort and consolidate, we discovered that the major river that feeds the gigantic lake that forms at the end of our driveway every time it rains apparently runs smack through the middle of our garage. When organizing the garage, we tried very hard to make sure that all the boxes were up on crates or pallets, but when we went digging for specific items through the winter, things got shifted around and weren't always returned to their proper place.

Again, plenty of random stuff was tossed. The worst losses was a box containing almost ALL of my cookbooks. The only good news in that box was a pile of recipes on top (that weren't wet) that included my chili recipe that had been missing since last summer! The other sad box included my nice wood salad bowl and a matching picnic silverware holder. Fortunately, the beautiful wood crudite platter we got as a wedding gift was at the very top of the box and undamaged. Most of the rest of the box were things that can be scrubbed (and maybe cloroxed) and they will be fine.

While one goal of ours was to sort through our stuff and get rid of some things, this really isn't what we meant...