Nasty...

My dad spreading kitty litter around the crawl space- I think they used three 10 pound bags

Rotten stuff in the bucket.... ewwww

More nastiness

my dad probably thinking "How did I get myself into this?"

Andy- I'm goin in!

The trailer full of all the junk

Okay, so we live in a house that is almost 50 years old. I think it was built in 1961. It's a cute little house, but when we moved in it needed a ton of work and we have done it. It's been very rewarding and looking back, it has been fun (although at the time, I hated it :) But, with old houses come some not to fun things. We just found out about a month ago that our roof leaks, so we're going to have to get that fixed, and then a couple of months ago, I noticed a "smell" in the basement. It wasn't too bad, just kind of a musty, weird odor. Sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn't. Well, it progressively got worse until we started smelling it in the kitchen too. Andy crawled down under the house, into the crawl space and found the culprit. There was a bunch of standing water all over the tarps lining the crawl space. So, a couple Saturdays ago, he attempted to clean it up. It was disgusting. He soaked the moisture up with kitty litter and then pulled the tarp up to find that it was way worse than it first seemed. There was water EVERYWHERE. And as soon as he pulled the first tarp up, the smell got 100 times worse. He came out and we didn't know what to do. Obviously this had been going on for some time. We called around to Utah disaster, AAA flood, The mold company and the cheapest quote we got was $2000 to clean it up, and then on top off that, we still had to find out where the leak was coming from, so one company recommended that we call American Leak Detection. That would cost even more, so Andy talked to my dad ( who owns a construction company, so he knows a little bit about houses :) and he came over yesterday and they decided to do it themselves. Let me tell you, they are my heroes!! I could not believe how absolutely nasty and disgusting it was! The pictures don't do it justice, and the smell.... OH MY GOSH. They cleaned it all out and found the leak. Apparently the main pipe from the kitchen sink and dishwasher was completely corroded and cracked. They cut out the bad pipe and replaced it with a new one and deoderized the crawl space. I can't believe how great it smells in the basement now! Well, after we aired it out all day yesterday. Andy hauled all the crap to the dump in a trailer and he said it smelled better at the dump than it had in our crawl space. He even pulled up next to a guy who was unloading a trailer and the guy asked Andy "What is that smell?!" Andy laughed and said "That was in my house" So, anyway thank you dad and Andy, you two are the greatest! That just gave me one more reason why I am so glad I'm a woman and not a guy.