Well, life sure isn't dull around the Stern household. Our home has survived water coming into our basement...clean water, not muddy, Thank God!( this happened June 10) However, our vacation summer trailer(a fullsized mobile home) located on the Upper Iowa River did not survive. The river came way out of its banks(June 5) and whiped out our summer 'paradise'. There was 1-2 feet of mud throughout the trailer. Two whole sides were crushed in. Anything that might have been salvagable was looted. Fortunately, most of what we had there was used(second hand...not new). I would have loved to rescue some pihotographs, but alas, it was not meant to be.

We we able to be helped by FEMA for our home, but got nada for the trailer...not our primary residence.

We got by pretty good compared to many others in our area. There are some homes that took the brunt of the river and now the owners aren't even allowed to go into their home to get things. They may even condemn the house...meaning the owner will never get to go into the house.

We live about a mile from the river and have never had so much as a drop of water in the past 30 years, but our neighborhood used to be the riverbed, as I understand, so the soil is mostly sand. There is a *beep* that held, but the water pressure in the soil forced the water into our basement, via small cracks in the poured concrete. We lost the carpeting. We were totally unprepared for water, so the water had risen to about 6-8 inches before we were able to purchase and install a sump pump. So, the bottom 3 feet of the drywall had to be ripped out as well as the carpet. We purchased a second dehumidifier and box fan to help dry out the floor. My hubby purchased an industrial fungicide to kill any mold or fungus. We ordered carpeting from Menards and plan on installing panelling as wanescoating on the bottom 3 feet of the walls and put a chairrail on the seam.

The only real winners of this whole ordeal are the hardware/building supply places.

WEll, so much for our local economy stimilus, huh? Anyway, life is not dull! Lotsa things to do...like sanitize and sort through the stuff we were able to pull out of the basement before the water got out of hand.