Basement Flooded - Basement Renovations (the discovery)| Part 1 of 3

After moving into our home in 2014 we made a few upgrades over the course of the last few years to our basement by adding a home theater and a few other cosmetic updates. We were very happy with the results and have been enjoying the fruits of our laborer ever since.
Here is a picture taken earlier this year that shows the home theater portion of the basement.

Even though I was happy with the results, I always wanted to do more upgrades, but time and budget constraints always deterred those thoughts.

On April 3rd, 2017 the unexpected happened, my wife went downstairs to get some stuff out of storage and when she placed her foot off the last step onto the basement carpet her foot sank into water. She initially thought it was just water that was spilled on the carpet but as she took more steps into the basement the amount of water soaked in the carpet remained. She immediately called me down and after having previous experience with light flooding in other homes I knew it was something with the sump pump. I directly went to where the sump pump basin was and as expected there was an inch of stagnant water.

After inspecting the pump it looked to be still pumping but the area wasn't draining, but as you will read later it was a simple reason why and very dumb of me not to think of checking a little further. Since I have a lot of sensitive equipment around my workshop area were the sump basin is, I started to turn everything off and pull power strips from the electrical outlets.

With the initial shock of all this going on I didn't know what to do, so I called all the local plumbers in my area and everyone was already out on a call, of course that's how it always goes. Then I called our regular handyman and wasn't able to get him on the phone but left a voice message. So I decided to quickly go asses the remaining portions of the basement and how much damage there was. As I walked around it wasn't a good sign, water soaked at least 70% of the 1500 sq.ft of carpet, but luckily the water hadn't crept up the sheetrock. My wife initially discovered the water at around 2:00 PM but I had been down in the basement up to around 10 am and didn't notice any water. So in the course of 4 hours all this water had backed up into the basement.

To keep the damage from spreading I quickly headed to the local hardware store and purchased a water pump and hooked up a garden hose to it and placed it into the sump basin and finally the water was starting to slowly recede. While I was focused on getting the water pumped out of the basement, my family was busy moving whatever they could that was sitting on top of the wet carpet to the few small areas of carpet that were still dry. Their quick thinking saved a lot of items from being damaged by the water. While the pump did it's job in pumping out the water to the street, we got our carpet cleaner and used it to suck the water that we could from the carpet so it wouldn't continue to soak into the wood and possibly sheetrock.

Luckily our handyman called me back and I explained the situation and he rushed over. By this time a considerable amount of water had been pumped out by the pump I placed into the sump basin. So he was able to take a closer look and figured out that the intake was clogged with roots and debris, as I mentioned earlier I should've thought of this but with the shock of what was going on, wasn't thinking straight. After he cleared the clog, the water started to empty even faster with two pumps going at once and I was finally able to see the concrete without stagnant water. Over the course of another hour, all the stagnant water was drained from the floor and the sump basin was empty.

It was 5 pm by the time I turned off the pump and my family was still sucking the water out of the carpet from the corners of the room. Bucket after bucket of water was still being sucked out of the water with no end in sight. So we continued till 9 pm sucking up water and cleaning what we could and was finally able to get the carpet to where it was just damp and not soaked with water. We were finally confident the walls, surrounding wood and items wouldn't be prone to more damage from water overnight until we were able to work on it again the next day.

I wanted this to be a three part post so I didn't have to cram everything into a single post. Plus we are still finishing up the final touches for the final before & after results. Stay tuned for the next part which will include a lot of pics and videos of the clean-up process, what a massive amount of work it was! Follow me so you can be notified when the next part is posted!