Our story so far: Wrong wiring here, a wrong faucet there … as we finished details on the old Methodist church we were turning into a home, we had to correct mistakes that had been made earlier in the renovation.

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When it rained, it poured, as the old figure of speech goes. It applied literally, too. Another monsoon befell us, this time while we were trying to enjoy some free time over Labor Day weekend. It washed out our boating plans and our basement.

The basement was still flooding on the regular. It appeared that Tyler’s inventive drainage techniques, executed via a lot of back-breaking digging by his hired man St. Johnny, had resolved the leaks on the south and north sides of the church. But he hadn’t finished working on the east side, where huge piles of dirt we’d salvaged from the school’s parking lot still stood as monuments to Tyler’s distractions inside the church. Rain barrels and rock were invested in, and St. Johnny dug man-sized holes to accommodate them.

We crossed our fingers until the next rainfall, and then it happened. Rain poured out of the sky. Tyler peeked out the window, and the gutter on the east side of the house looked like an active fire hose, shooting water eight feet out into the yard. He braved the heavy rain to secure the elbow at the bottom of the gutter. Ugh, he’d forgotten to secure that section with a screw. He reconnected the pieces of gutter so all the water from roof was now shooting into his drainage system, not the yard. But some of the early deluge, alas, made it into the basement.

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Tomorrow: Good afternoon, good evening and good night! Chapter 39 about everything wrong with the church wraps up. Read about it here.