How to clean your basement

We learned how to efficiently clean our basement this weekend.

1. Fill basement with 3" to 5" water.
You can do this yourself by putting a hose in the basement, but we opted for the free route of having our power go out at midnight Friday morning, and let the torrential rainfall seep into our basement. Woo-hoo...way to avoid that high water bill!
2. Let soak for a few hours, or in our case until 6:30am when we woke up to a hot, sticky house b/c we still have no power and realized we should check our basement.
3. Purchase costly gas powered generator from Home Depot employees who laugh at you and wish you luck. Dangerous thing to do when it's 7:00am and you haven't had coffee because you still have no power.
4. Let your husband move all the boxes from the basement to your backyard because you can't lift a damn thing b/c you're 7.5 months pregnant.
5. Run to Home Depot again for a longer extension cord for the generator. Plug in generator to sump pump and curse yourself for not having battery backup system for said sump pump.
6. Let the neighbors come over and look at your ruined, limp, wet stuff that has been scattered across the backyard drying all day.
7. Grill out with neighbors since food in your fridge/freezer is defrosting at an alarming rate. Admire their wet, ruined stuff in their backyards, too.
8. Go to Costco and purchase shelving units for basement and lots of Rubbermaid containers for basement storage.
9. Sort through semi-dry stuff. Wonder why you had half that crap saved in boxes in the basement. Fill multiple trash bags with ruined stuff, including most of your Christmas ornaments that now weigh three pounds each because they were filled with water and quickly rusted.
10. Assemble shelving units. Have husband carry back down all the stuff now in Rubbermaid tubs. Give husband lots of beer.

We now have a fresh, clean basement without a speck of dust in it because it was all washed away. Aren't you jealous?

I hope your weekend was better than ours!