Yikes! 2011 was a bad year.

Last edited Thu Nov 6, 2025, 01:17 PM - Edit history (1)

I have not looked at these pictures in a long time. Since I am kind of incapacitated right now, I'm scrolling through old pictures.

My M-I-L died in early 2011.

I was tasked with taking care of her estate. Exactly one month of backbreaking days. Stripped her house of furniture and belongings. Carried a washing machine up basement stairs myself and hauled it to the landfill in my Chevy Blazer. About 50 trips to the landfill to get rid of everything. I sent all of the good stuff to auction. Everything was stripped from the house. Worked with the lawyer and the realtor. Had the house sold and the estate completely closed in one month.

Whew.

Then came tropical storm Lee, which parked itself over our house for a few days and dropped 12 inches of rain. We were lucky. My street slopes upward from the source of the flood. I was the last house on the street to get water.

There were about 50 homes in my development that had to be torn down. Some homes had water up to their chimneys.

We got exactly 4 feet of water in the basement. It was not surface water. It was clear and glass-like, it was water that seeped up through the drain. So clean you could almost drink it.

Lost the furnace and water heater and water softener. Lost power for a few weeks. Wife stayed in a hotel nearby. I stayed home with the dog...and the flashlights.

Neighbors helped immensely. Red Cross truck came by daily with delicious food, including entire bags of apples. We were boiling spaghetti on the grill outside.

Neighbors lovingly helped us dry out about 4,000 photos in between layers of paper towels. I finished drying all of them with a hair dryer.

A half dead woodchuck floated over on a piece of wood. I relocated him and I think he survived.

You couldn't find any pumps to save your life up here. Home Depot was fucking destroyed. It took them months to open up again. I went to Lowe's looking for pumps. They were completely sold out. Nothing was working there because of limited power. They didn't have any pumps, but I bought something, and they had to run my credit card manually through one of those old sliding machines with the carbon paper.

A friend drove all the way up here from Long Island with pumps, hoses, and fittings. He hooked everything up for me to get the pumps going, then he went home the same day. This guy was a blessing.

I was up for 3 days working until I started stumbling around and not calling people by their right names. My neighbor grabbed my shoulders, walked me into the bedroom, and literally pushed me into the bed and told me to go to sleep.

When the basement dried out, I thought I was in the clear. Everything looked good downstairs and I breathed a sigh of relief. I don't have a finished basement, but I have a very nice basement with an oil base paint on the floor, and latex painted walls.

I went downstairs, and was happy that everything looked great. The walls have a masonry coating over the concrete blocks. I took the side of my fist and started hitting the coating. It crumbled, and there was mold behind it.

Shit.

I started scraping the paint off the floor. There was mold under the paint. I looked at the wall under the stairs. Moldy.

After the furnace etc. was replaced, I spent a few months of 14 hour days hand scraping every bit of masonry coating off the walls. I used a stripper on the floor to remove all of the paint. One foot at a time.

I demolished the sheetrock walls and a Masonite wall. and while they were down to the studs, I wired and installed 20 amp outlets for my tools. Then I repainted the floors and walls.

I think I wrote off about $50,000 as a casualty loss on my taxes. Pretty much the entire contents of the basement had to be brought to the curb. The town came by with front end loaders to pick everything up.

Below are some picks. Sorry for the bad quality, but it was was back in 2011, and I just had a shitty camera. Pics are in no particular order.

Edit: sorry for any repeated pics. i had to do them one at a time, and I kept losing track.