Good news all around

First of all, the good news is that FIL is out of the hospital. It turned out he was trying to reduce the dosage of his medication (with doctor's supervision of course), but that didn't work out all that well. Sounds like he's doing better back on the original dosage of the medication.

At home, it's been a very busy week. After managing to get rid of most of the water in the basement, we decided it was high time to install a sump pump. Because our setup is a bit unusual, and we didn't want someone coming in and telling us they have to drill some extra holes all over our basement, we decided to install the pump ourselves.

It's not really too complicated of a job, if you know what you're doing. Since we didn't really know what we were doing, I ended up going to the hardware store every evening this week just to pick up a few parts here and there. The guy at the Home Depot who gathered "everything we would need" forgot to remind us to get teflon tape for example. Sigh!

But in the end, the pump is finally installed. It's a little sad that it took us a whole week of evenings to do it, but we are pretty happy it's done. At first we installed a temporary solution, with a temporary flexible hose coming out through the window. Aside from the fact that the (brand new, purpose bought) hose was full of holes that were only marginally helped by duct tape, the first try worked reasonably well. So then we moved on to solid plumbing. Two check valves, one T connection, three elbows and 20 feet of pipe later, we have a pretty spiffy looking plumbing solution. Not too shabby if I may say so myself.

Aside from the plumbing work, we also had to clean up a lot of the junk that got wet during the flood. It was mostly old boxes and old paint cans and that kind of stuff, so nothing to get too upset about. But it still all had to be cleaned before mold started getting established... So lots of hauling of stuff. There's still a lot of un-wet boxes that have to be moved to the barn, because we've realized they're more likely to survive there :)

And yes, I have an unusual attachment to cardboard boxes. They have served me well in the past, and I don't like throwing them out while they still have lots of life and usefulness left in them. I figure as far as obsessions go, it's a pretty mild one, so I'm not too worried :)