We didn't set the alarm for Wednesday morning, which meant we slept in until 6 am or so. A little side note: Up here in Montana it doesn't get dark until about 10 pm and it starts to get bright (and I mean really bright) at 5:15 am. It definitely gives us the ability to stay up past 8:30 pm and it makes it a ton easier to wake up early, even when you don't have to. After a relaxing morning at home, we decided it was too cloudy and cold to go up to the mountains so we went and ran some errands, picked up a couple Wagon Wheels for lunch, then headed out to the Fish Hatchery for a walk. For me, life these days pretty much revolves around food- what are we going to have for lunch? what is for dinner? when is dinner? I'm hungry now, lets get a snack. So any activity Chad and I do or plan to do has to involve food before, during or directly after. I wonder if I could hike and eat bread pudding at the same time? I don't see why not. But I digress, when you come to visit, we will take you to get some Wagon Wheels and then take you out to the Fish Hatchery both are great attractions here in Lewistown and shouldn't be missed.
After hanging out around the Fish Hatchery, we came back into town to go to the grocery store to pick up our ingredients for dinner. See, we had food right before going to the fish hatchery and we were getting food directly after the fish hatchery. While we were picking up our last items in the grocery store, we heard the wind and rain start, then we looked out the windows and it was a storm for sure. You couldn't even see 2 feet outside the grocery store's front door. People coming into the store were soaked to the bone. Of course, Chad and I saw this as our opportunity to hop in the checkout line while everyone was watching the storm. Then the fun started. Hail started to fall and I mean it wasn't messing around. The power in the grocery store went out for a few seconds before the backup generators allowed the cash registers to come back on. We finished paying for our groceries, then went to stand by the door to wait out the storm and to watch what kind of damage we were getting from the hail. Thank goodness this hail wasn't anything like the hail folks in Oklahoma experienced this year, but this was the worst hail storm we had ever been in before. Here is the size of the hail that fell, so not too too bad:
The streets were flooding because the hail blocked all of the gutters. The grass and streets looked as though a snow storm just moved through town. Here are some pics of the street, the aforementioned hail and our house:
This storm had winds clocked at 80 mph. Mix high winds, hail and rain- fun things really start to happen. Our cars were all fine, but our house took quite the beating. The hail took off some of our exterior paint. It looks bad in only a few areas, but gives us a further excuse to re-paint the house- which we were hoping to do next summer, not this summer. The basement experienced the worst of it though. The one "finished" room in the basement flooded (I use the word "finished" lightly, because it just had some shoddy paneling up and then some carpet- it makes me question what the preivous owner's teenage daughter did to deserve to live down in that room because it is no place I would want to sleep). Chad had a fun day of ripping out paneling and pulling up carpet, so we could begin the drying out process. Each time it has rained since we moved in the house we have experienced some water coming in one area in the basement, but we knew where it was coming in and knew to watch out for it. When Chad found the flooding in the other area of the basement, we were completely shocked. I told Chad to just call the landlord and have them get over to fix their leaky basement. Dang it, we are the landlords.
There are a couple lessons to be learned from all this crazy weather. Never get complacent while living in Montana. The second you do, Montana throws another curve ball at you- the curve balls usually involve some form of atypical weather. "It hasn't rained this much in ten years" or "I haven't seen this much snow in April for ten years". Ten years, it's always ten years. Also, basements of a house built in 1915 will leak no matter what someone is trying to tell you. In this case, we believed the previous owner and her realtor. Funny because the previous owner stopped by for a surprise tour last week. This was awkward to say the least because I had no clue who she was and she invited herself in, took off her shoes and immediately began her self-guided tour. We have changed quite a few things in the house and she kept asking me what I thought of what she had done with this and that throughout the house and why we had changed certain things. Of course I couldn't say, "Lady, your style isn't our style so we plan on changing pretty much everything and you left the house really dirty so I am still sanitizing everything", so I just smiled and said "Ahh, yeah that is nice". I sure am glad the storm didn't come through town before she stopped by or I might have put my lawyer hat on (which isn't a pretty hat) and brought out that disclosure that she signed saying the basement never, ever flooded and asked her a few questions about it.
We are hopeful that this too shall pass. We are just really thankful that our our basement flooded now before we really had grand plans to re-finish the basement and that we were in town when it happened or else we would have had lost most, if not all of the items we had stored in the basement. This experience just makes us really question, what else does Montana have in store for us first time home owners? Please don't make it too bad...
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