Saturation and Bailout

The theme of my week was water. All of the snow plus freezing rain plus rain over the past two weeks has completely saturated the ground around our house. Our driveway became a sloppy puddly sticky mud pit. Our yard transformed into a squelchy marsh. As the temperature came back up into double digits last week and the snow receded, I noticed that the low gravel area next to the barn had become a full-on lake of frozen ice water. It didn't surprise me because of the intense weather we've had recently. Over the past week, a lot of snow started melting and plenty of rain fell, so I teased the swim team about doing a polar plunge at practice and avoided walking in that section of the driveway.

On Tuesday (January 23rd), a work crew was scheduled to come rip out the chicken nests, ramps, and feeding apparatus in our coop-turned-shed. Right after Amber caught the school bus, I went out to the shed to remove our lawn mower and a few other tools so the work crew could throw away everything else unsupervised. I put on my rain jacket and my tallest wellies and hiked out to the shed. When I crossed the driveway lake on my way to the shed, the water went up to my ankles. (thank goodness for tall rubber boots!) 

I squelched and slid my way across a completely saturated yard to the shed and saw something odd. There was water seeping out from under the shed door. Having just crossed so much oozing land, it took a second for my brain to register that water flowing out of the shed was not a good sign. With mounting trepidation, I unlatched and opened the shed doors. It was literal floodgates opening: the water gushed forth in a flood, free from its previously slow seeping state. I heard a rushing sound like a waterfall, coming from the back of the shed. Three buckets bobbed about in several inches of standing water on the concrete shed floor. The smell of wet chicken poop hung heavily in the damp air. 

All of these observations took about 20 seconds. Then my reaction caught up to my eyes, and my stomach dropped down to my feet. "Oh NO! No no no no no noooo!" During last week's deep freeze we had forgotten that the shed had a sink inside, so the pipes froze and burst in the thaw. Who puts a kitchen sink in a shed anyways? The same person that hung a xylophone on the wall for their chickens to play with, below a wall-mounted chicken-nest bunk bed complex. With four night lights and a space heater nearby. The previous owners of our house adored their chickens. 

The water kept spewing and I was frozen with uncertainty and anxiety, ankle deep in chicken shed water. Those buckets kept bobbing on the current. "Shut off the water!" The thought broke through my paralysis and I waded to the cabinets at the back of the shed. It was a weird setup. I couldn't get the silver valve under the sink to budge, so I texted Jeff. He suggested turning the water off in the well house. So I waded back out of the shed and squelched across the yard. Back inside the house, I put my boot-clad feet on an old towel and shimmied across the floor to grab the well house keys. (Tall rubber boots are wearisome to take off, and my boots were covered in chicken water; hence the towel-floor-shimmy.)

Keys in my fist, I squelched back across the yard to the well house. Inside the cozy well house (we remembered to put a space heater in there), I turned a likely looking valve and squish-hiked back upstream to the shed. No change to the waterfall. Back to the well house. Back to the shed. Somewhere during this time I called my mom using my Bluetooth headphones. She was calm and sympathetic and having her voice in my ear tamed my building freak-out. Looking around the shed yet again, I noticed more water seeping out of a cabinet to the right of the sink, so I opened that one and LAAAA!! Behold, a valve, hand labeled in permanent marker: "water shut off" with a helpful on/off arrow. The only problem now was I had to reach deep into the back of the cabinet, up to my shoulder, through the spray of gushing water, to turn the valve off. Blessing my 5k/5k Eddie Bauer rain jacket, I sacrificed my jeans to Poseidon, crouched into the spray, and reached for the valve. 

It wouldn't budge. I twisted harder. Nada. I had water spraying in my face, down my arm and bent legs, and spattering all over my glasses. I pulled out for a breather. I couldn't find anything to help me turn the valve, so I dove in again and cranked it for all I was worth. I felt it twist, and a beautiful sudden silence met my ears. The water was off! The waterfall was blocked! 

The next step was to move/salvage our stuff out of the shed. Before getting started, I hunted around the bobbing buckets till I found a pair of mostly dry gardening gloves. With my hands somewhat protected, I got to work. 

First up was the mower, which was nearly up to the hubcaps in water but thankfully unharmed. The yard was so soft I worried that the mower would sink in and get stuck at worst, or at best leave massive awful tracks in our new lawn. Feeling super resourceful, I cast my eyes around and found a stack of quaint miniature plastic picket fence pieces (left behind by the previous owner, for beautifying a chicken yard-- seriously). I laid those in a grid pattern on the soft ground right in front of the shed ramp. Next I had to move the massive 20 foot long insulated tarp that the concrete guys had covered the new shed ramp with while the concrete cured two weeks ago. That involved lifting half a dozen 18 inch square hunks of paving stones and bricks that they had used to weigh down the tarp in the wind. When I finally lifted the sodden tarp up, a large dark rodent jumped out of the tarp and scampered away. I shriek-yelled and about gave UP right then and there. But there was no one to take up my slack, so I tentatively pulled on a corner of the tarp until I was sure no more rodents would erupt from it.  

I laid the orange tarp out like a red carpet on the muddy soft grass, in a long column across the grass between the shed and the un-melted snow. It created a perfect path. I hoped that this would prevent the mower from getting bogged down in mud. It totally worked! And the mower wheels stayed clean too! 

Once the mower was parked outside, I got our wheelbarrow out of the barn and filled it twice with the random shed stuff we wanted to save. I deposited the very wet shovels, irrigation supplies, and other tools into a plastic sled in the barn. Back in the shed, the water was still there on the floor, several inches deep. It wasn't flowing out the door; it was just sitting there. I grabbed a frayed chicken poop broom and started sweeping the water out the door. That kind of worked, but I quickly learned that the shed floor was slanted away from the door. The shed was big enough that I couldn't stand in one place near the back and sweep water out the door. But I had to try! 

I did five big sweeps through the deepest water at the back of the shed to get the water moving, then ran to the front of the shed to chase it down and sweep it out the door. It worked for a little while, but sweeping water uphill with an old broom was not a long-term solution.

After 20 minutes of very tiring water sweeping, the water started swirling back around to me instead of going out the door. So I looked around the shed again and grabbed a floating dustpan. I hiked back across the yard and retrieved a rusty wheelbarrow left by construction workers. Armed with a dustpan and a wheelbarrow, I began to bail out the shed by hand, scooping water into the wheelbarrow with the dustpan. Soon I found a second dustpan and double-fisted my water-scooping operation. I filled two wheelbarrows full of water using my dustpan scooping method, and dumped them outside. The main room of the shed was still oozing a bit, but it was not full of standing water anymore. Success!

I peeked into the other room of the shed (a wall divides the shed in half longways into the room with the sink, and the chicken nest room). That chicken room is where the mice flourish and where the previous owner did not clean up after the chickens before they left. It creeps me out. I have only looked in there two or three times since we took ownership of this property almost 10 months ago. It's gross and creepy and stinky in there! But it was just as full of water as the sink room, and the water wasn't going anywhere because the floor was very well caulked around the edges. That shed is tight like unto a dish! Figures! My one comfort was it seemed unlikely that mice would be active in the water. Hopefully. 

After a lengthy mental pep talk, I wheeled the barrow into the chicken room and employed my dustpans. The dustpan scooping method seemed too slow, so I obtained a bucket by emptying some PVC debris out of one of the formerly bobbing buckets. I used the dustpan to fill the bucket, then dumped the bucket into the wheelbarrow. Dustpan to bucket to wheelbarrow, over and over. It may seem like a lot of steps, but my legs were already burning from all of the squatting and water-lifting, so I needed to minimize the up-down motion. This way I only had to lift the bucket and stand every five to seven scoops or so. Once I got my bucket filling rhythm down, I managed to bail out the chicken room relatively efficiently. I did struggle a bit when I had to scoop up a mouse carcass that was sunken in the water, tail waving in the current of my bucket-scooping. 

It was like a horror show, honestly: sodden sawdust mixed with rancid chicken poop, and a dead mouse belly up on the side. GAG. Did I mention the ghastly smell of the place? The damp made it feel like the chicken stench was seeping into my skin.

Once the water was mostly gone, all that was left was a smattering of sawdust and wet chicken leavings. I almost left it. But again, none of it would go anywhere if I didn't act, so I dug a cracked five gallon plastic trash can out of the coop debris to use as a bin. I raked, shoveled, and scooped the dung into the trash can. After the trash can was full and after another half-wheelbarrow or so of water bailing, my work was done. I looked at my watch. Three hours had elapsed. It felt like three days. 

Three hours, five and a half big wheelbarrows of water, and five gallons of chicken poop: that was the sum of my morning. Even though I felt proud of myself for my successful hard work, I also felt equally disgusting and disgusted, and I will most likely never be the same after this ordeal. Back in our house, I stood just inside the door next to the washer, stripped my filthy smelly clothes off, and threw them in the wash right away. Then I scrubbed my hands with soap and water, and threw the hand towel I used into the wash with everything else for good measure. Next came a long hot shower with lots of scrubbing. Once I was dressed, I used a Clorox wipe to sanitize my cell phone, which I had touched several times with chicken-water hands. Mental state notwithstanding, I finally felt clean enough to sit on the couch.

View of the shed through the mist and across the flooded driveway. (A dumpster was dropped off for the demo crew, but it sat there unused for several days before the guys finally came to work on the shed.)

Ankle deep in icy floodwater on our driveway.

View looking back at the barn and house, with that icy lake flooding the foreground.

Pictures don't do the flood justice--can you see the water rushing out of the open shed door? That dust pan was carried outside on the current.

The sun came out briefly while I worked and softened the ground into a mucky sticky slop fest. That orange tarp had a rodent hiding in it. SHUDDER. I could barely lift those tombstone-sized paving slabs so I sort of rolled them off the tarp and left them upright like Sunnyside's own Stonehenge or something.

The tarp, spread out like a red carpet. I still can't believe that worked so well.

The chicken nest room, full of stagnant FOUL fowl water. See the toy xylophone on the lower right wall? All of this has since been removed by the work crew, but the scent remains.

After several wheelbarrows of water, the pipes still oozed a bit. All of those boxes on the counter were on the floor disintegrating in the water.

Tired/discouraged/grossed out selfie with the shed.

When I checked on the shed a few hours later, it was drying out nicely.

Two days later, the lake waters had receded a bit and it was no longer ankle deep.

This is our mudhole of a driveway on Saturday, January 27th. Getting the mail has never been such a mess.

(Our official driveway is the road on the left.)

I went on a run on Saturday morning, and a mile into my run, it started pouring rain. 33 degrees and rainy is the worst combination. There was just enough of a cross breeze to spatter my glasses uniformly in raindrops. It was just cold enough that my glasses fogged up. I was a miserable mess when I got home!

Walking up our driveway--the mud was so deep. It has drained and dried significantly in the past 24 hours, but the driveway was mush like this for over a week.

The approach to our house--my van fishtailed in the mud every time.

We plan to get some gravel in the springtime.

Amber, traversing the driveway lake while bringing in the trashcan. It is a long cold 200 meter walk down the driveway to put the trash out, and that walk only got more difficult with the saturated snowy muddy driveway.

Old filter/new filter: another fun watery project I did this week was learn to change our house's water filter. Let's just say it was a wet learning curve. Can you believe that the old filter on the left got that brown and disgusting in just 3 months of living here?

Yet another water-based activity from this week: I figured out how to use the new-to-us barn floor scrubber. That thing glides along like a miniature zamboni and it scrubbed all of the dirt caking the floor from months of dryland swim practices. It was very satisfying. (Don't mind Coach Winger and one of our runners in the background doing some priming exercises before a track workout.)

So clean!

One final water-based activity of the week: Jay had a swim meet on Thursday night, wherein he got PRs in both of his events (500 freestyle and 100 backstroke) and qualified for the district meet. Go Jay! Rose went along to help with the timing, but because the meet was across windy wintry country roads way out in Moses Lake, Amber and I stayed home together. When I asked Amber what she wanted to do together, her eyes lit up and she said "draw!" So we drew. Amber drew gemstones and I worked on face sketching with my pen. These are the only pictures of any of my kids that I took this week. It was a challenging week of wet barriers, which dampened my photographic enthusiasm.

Mother daughter drawing time at the kitchen counter: a cozy evening activity.