There was a fantastic storm last Thursday night: tons of rain, some lightning, and really loud thunder. Our roof was just replaced the weekend before, so instead of spending the stormy evening worried about shingles flying away and water pouring in, I worked on my blog. That’s right – I was so confident in our invincibility that I didn’t even unplug my computer. And I’ve had a computer zapped by lightning before, so I’m normally pretty good about unplugging.

It’s not just computers. During lightning storms I’m afraid to:

• be outside
• be under trees
• be under shrubs, because they’re just like little trees
• plug in my phone
• sit near a window
• talk on a phone with a cord
• wash dishes
• take a shower
• take a bath

Am I crazy? I don’t think so.

But last weekend I was feeling good. Leave-the-computer-plugged-in kind of good. That is, until I heard my husband slam the door downstairs.

I went down. “What’s wrong?”

“Water is coming through the door!” he replied.

And it was. Water was seeping through the door because the drain was clogged. Possibly even with debris leftover from having our roof done. Oops.

We’ve lived in our house for more than five years and we’ve never had a problem with water getting in the basement. In fact, we were so confident in our dry basement that we put down a laminate floor to double our living space. Well, our storage space. I can’t say we do a lot of living in the basement when it’s so full of stuff.

But suddenly the laminate was wet. Not with tons of water, mind you. There was a bit of water on the tile and we mopped that up right away. In fact, I thought we were in the clear at first. Then I started walking around.

To my dismay, water squished up in the cracks I stepped on one plank, then disappeared when I moved my weight to another spot. My husband and I just kept walking around in silence, listening for the squooshy sound of water underneath the flooring. I knew immediately that it would have to come up. Plus, the Facebook hive mind was unanimous – the laminate had to come up or I’d risk mold. And I’m more afraid of mold than I am of washing dishes in a lightning storm.

We got started the next day. The first piece of laminate was really hard to get up – in the end, my husband had to break it in half. The next few pieces were still pretty hard to free. It was exhausting, but I refused to admit defeat, for an hour at least. Then I admitted defeat. And I went to bed.

The next day I pulled up half our basement floor during Forest’s nap time. At first, I tried to be careful, hoping that we could salvage some of it. Then a friend came over to reassure me that 1) there is no way we’re going to find the exact same laminate to replace what we pull up, and 2) we cannot just put something completely different down and expect no one to notice. He said that the whole floor had to come up. In a way that was reassuring, because I was afraid that I had gone overboard. From that moment on, it’s been a free-for-all, pulling up flooring in every spare moment. Right now we just have laminate left at the dry ends of the room, so I’m taking a break and instead I’m washing the dust off the floor. Which is next to impossible because we’re having the basement bathroom renovated this week, and that brings a truckload of its own dust.

It’s been an experience, for sure. I wanted to write a hilarious post about the seven stages of discovering your basement is wet – you know, despair, guilt, bargaining – but I don’t feel those emotions. I mostly feel completely overwhelmed by the enormous job of pulling up a floor and redoing it… and also a bit of gratitude. Which is weird, I know. Yet I just feel so thankful that James noticed the leaking early on in the evening instead of the next day. I’m thankful that my friend came by on Saturday to check on the floor for me. I’m grateful that my dad was able to help me over the phone. I’m grateful that my cousin is working on my bathroom this week and he is able to calm me down when I start to feel panicky. He is grateful that he’s already scheduled to be here to work on my bathroom, so he’s being paid to calm me down. I’m grateful to all my friends that hounded their husbands for advice. I’m grateful for the people that have offered to take Forest out of the house so I can get a bit more work done.

Yeah, it sucks that we put so much money into a floor that now we’re throwing away. But I’m not angry; I don’t feel guilty; I’m not bitter. To be honest, given how fearful I am of mold, I’m actually a teeny bit happy that we will have an unfinished floor now that I can monitor at all times. Paranoid people like me don’t cope well with nice flooring. Or lightning storms.