The Door Is Open Wide

Me, after last post: I'll make a post with my vids when I have a little more time! :)
My house: *floods*
Me: :(

...okay it wasn't quite that dramatic. Only almost. Including waking to insistent beeping at 3:30am to find no lights working, the fridge (which was the insistently beeping thing) blinking a warning that it was losing electricity, and a plant light flickering like a haunted thing.

Now, we have had to check the fuses before, but not in the middle of a freezing night with a foot of snow outside. (The electrical main is on the outside of the house.) So that was an experience! But we did find a main fuse had flipped off, so flipped it back on.

And then, just as I was settling in for my half day at work (I am also on sick leave 50% because of a very bad... seven months) I got a text from my husband with pictures of our basement flooded with sewer water, and our heating pump freaking out.

Oh, and it was his birthday.

Hahah. Ha.

We've been homeowners for three years, and this was the biggest "fuck fuck what do we do agh fuck" moment so far! Fortunately our home insurance company knew who to call to start un-flooding the basement, and it is literally just a little storage room with its own door, not a furnished basement or even connected to the upstairs in any way. (We had some bad smell in the bathroom above it, but nothing that spread further after I covered the drain and put a plate of vinegar out.) So we didn't lose anything important!

We did start freaking out a bit about the heating pump, for obvious reasons of a heating system being something you don't want breaking in the middle of winter, but our electrician literally sold us the house, and he was able to come around within a few hours of getting my call.

So by 2pm, our basement was scrubbed clean and was being dried by an industrial fan, and all of the secret fuses we had not remembered existed had been replaced/switched back on. Heat worked! Electricity worked! Just the way we and the kitties like it.

The root cause for all of this was a randomly blocked sewer pipe that we had to pay to have unclogged by a vacuum truck, but discovering an emergency during office hours is great for getting a good rate on that sort of thing!

Now to research whether or not it's worth getting some kind of check valve or something installed in that particular basement floor drain.

...and at some point I will also have the time and energy to post the vids I made. But for now, that's what's happening over here! Hope everyone else is having a much less exciting week.