That was a barrel of laughs

Here's a way that you don't want to start the day before Thanksgiving - you know, the day when your plan is to do a lot of prep cooking. My wife was going to head off to the gym, so I had to fetch the clean laundry from the basement - that's where all the clean bathing suits were. That's when I found today's nasty homeowner problem - basement flooding.

It's been raining, but not too heavily - so my first thought was some kind of leak. That wasn't the case, and it was unlikely anyway - we had installed a fairly large scale drainage system two summers ago outside. When I walked past the washing machine, the problem became clear - it had been on "rinse" all night (specifically, the fill portion) - and water was pouring out. Turning it off stopped any further damage, but there was water all over. For extra fun, the sump pump is on the other end of the basement, and the floor near the laundry area slopes away from it.

The water was maybe a tenth of an inch deep in places, so a pump was out of the question - $45 later I had a shop-vac. I sucked up the water while Jackie looked at the washer - which wasn't broken (a good break there). The upshot is, we now have scads of damp clothes to wash, and a potential mold problem to deal with. Lovely way to slide into the holiday...