Thankful Thursday

Today I'm particularly thankful for this downspout!

For years after we moved in {and even before -- which we knew when we bought the house} we would get water in our basement whenever there was a heavy rain. It was a bummer! Especially after the basement got "finished"! {It still couldn't be considered a finished basement, but it's closer now than it was before. You know, walls, a toilet, shower and sink, tile -- rather than cement -- on the floors, real furniture and stuff}. We tried a few different things to fix the problem {without spending the big bucks to dig out all around our house and drain tile} and it only seemed to get worse!

The fall I was pregnant with Anna {2007} it was particularly bad {or I was particularly hormonal and extra crabby about it, which is very possible!}. So one day my dad decided that maybe adding one more downspout on the west side of the house might help, or, at the least, couldn't hurt! So he spent probably less than $10 at the hardware store, got up on the ladder, sawed a hole in our gutter on the north by northwest {that's a little family humor there for ya, if you got it, great! Otherwise just move along!} corner of our house, attached the downspout and waited for the next heavy rain.


It seemed to have been exactly what we needed! It has been almost 2 years since this downspout went up {or down, I guess} and we haven't had water in our basement once since then. Today, I am thankful {once again} for this downspout {and for my dad!} because yesterday we had TONS and TONS of rain {along with 3 or 4 trips to the basement when the tornado sirens were sounding} and the basement stayed dry the whole time. What a blessing! It's been a pretty dry summer overall, but when it rains it really rains! I'm not sure what the totals were right in our neighborhood, but the 24-hour rainfall totals in parts of Minnesota were over 6 inches! That's a bunch of rain! Good thing it's not winter, we would have had quite a blizzard with those kind of numbers!