Mother Nature hates us...

I am SO SICK of snow! This was the kind of snow that hurts to shovel. It was thick, heavy, wet, and sloppy. It was NOT an easy clean-up!!

Then there was the whole ice dam situation. I come downstairs this afternoon (I spent most of the day upstairs playing on my computer and grading) and I hear a strange noise. Turns out, it is a practical DELUGE of dripping water in the bowed window in the living room. I move everything out of the way and get towels. LOTS of towels-the dripping went right through most of them. I call husband-no answer. I call mom-no answer. I call stepdad-no answer. I call in-laws-no answer. I call aunt-she tells me to call uncle. I call uncle, and FINALLY get ahold of someone!! He says it's most likely an ice dam, and to wait till the boy gets home because he doesn't want me on a ladder or on the roof when no one else is home (he doesn't want me there even when someone IS home). I look out onto the porch roof from the second story window, and I thought I saw the problem - there's an overhang from the main roof over the porch roof.

The boy finally gets home and gets stuck in the driveway. I hadn't had the chance to shovel since I found out about the leak. I had been trying to find ways to stop the flood. No luck.
I go out to help the boy, he heads to Home Depot to find a roof rake. Again, no luck.

I shovel the driveway, he shovels the roof. It doesn't seem to stop the waterfall in our living room, because all of a sudden the fire alarms are going off. Turns out the water started flowing through the living room smoke detector and caused it to go off. I unplug it from the ceiling, only to be soaked when the water pours out on my head. Luckily, most of the water came out on my head, and it was just dripping after that.

I finally get ahold of my stepdad, and he thought to have me check the crawlspace to see if there was water up there. BOY was there water up there! The rug in the crawlspace was soaked - we left handprints in the rug as the water seeped up. We cut the rug in half and rolled it up. The boy ran his section through the house because it was so completely soaked that it was dripping. We mopped up the crawlspace to see where the water was coming in from. We pulled a piece of insulation out of the way to discover the ice dam was actually on the main roof.

Back out onto the porch roof again....

The boy tries shoveling off the main roof on the side of the front dormer. Success! The water slows down and eventually stops.

We go back to shoveling the driveway, which was interrupted when the fire alarms started going off.

We have a quick dinner of mac n' cheese - organic, no less! (ann would be proud)

Then we start getting ready for bed. I went into the basement to get the towels out of the dryer to lay out by the window just in case, and I step in a puddle.

ARGH!

There's water on the basement floor. We don't know WHERE it came from. It was in the middle of the floor - not near a door or window. There wasn't any dripping through the ceiling or down the walls we could see. We mopped that up, and will have to check on it tomorrow morning. It's kind of strange that with all of the rain we got this summer, we didn't get ANY water inside of our house.

I replaced the towels in the living room, and noticed that we'll probably have to repair part of the ceiling around the fire alarm. There is a significant bubble in the ceiling plaster. It's empty - there's nothing in it, but it's only going to dry, crack and crumble off. I did manage to pop the bubble on the wall - I removed the water and it seems to have shrunk back up to the wall again. We'll see if it holds.

Oh - and did I mention that a stupid plow nailed our mailbox??