Flood Damage Journal

THE VERY SHORT VERSION: A part of our house got flooded and I am opening commissions specifically to help pay for repair costs. I am okay, the rest of the house is okay, but we need to completely take up the moldy floor, toss it out, and redo it completely - and I can't help because being in the room sets off my asthma. So the one thing I can do is art. - Reply to this journal or PM if interested.

The Very Long Version

Hi it's been a while since I did a journal entry, but this was important and I’ve already taken too long to get around to doing this.

So last week on Thursday night, a room that me and my twin use as a library and studio (along with a bit of our garage next door) got flooded.

It had been raining on and off for several days, so our garden had gotten really really swampy, but at the time it was just an inconvenient mess, nothing to worry about. Until last Thursday evening it started raining heavily, and kept raining.

I had been up late that evening with my twin looking up information on a TV series we had been watching. The series had become unbearable to watch but we still wanted to know how it ended (it was cringe reasons, it is a comedy series which had some really nice heartfelt moments but then kept ruining the mood with terrible crude jokes) so we had just wrapped up reading the pages and complaining about the ending, also, realizing how late it was, being 11pm, I was going to be heading to sleep when me and my twin suddenly noticed there was a small amount of water around our shoes.

Water leakage has happened before, so I assumed there must be a blockage with the drain outside so I went and grabbed a mop while suggesting to my twin to go check the drain to see if she could remove what could be causing the problem.

At first I thought things weren’t too bad as I was managing to mop up the water fine, I also hadn’t wanted to tell our parents of the situation at the start as A) Didn’t think things would get bad and B) I knew our Dad would make the situation much worse to handle, or at least for me it would be a lot harder to get things done with him around.

However, my twin did the smart thing and informed them, but I didn’t hear her say she was going to do that. There came a point where I wanted to know how things were going, as water was still leaking in and I was doing the best I could with the mopping, so I opened the sliding door to the garden to see if I could spot my twin. It was pelting buckets and visibility was low so I thought I saw her just standing in the middle of the garden for some reason so called out to her.

It was not my twin, it was my Dad. My twin and him have the same coloured raincoats and within the darkness and rain I had mistaken him for her, so when he approached instead of my twin I wasn’t pleased. ‘Great,’ I thought to myself, ‘this is the start of things getting harder to manage’ and I was right, because from then on we kept butting heads on how best to deal with the situation, getting in each other’s way, getting confused, and getting cross with each other. Mum was able to defuse the situation a bit and redirect our energies but that had its own problems.

I got stuck in an autistic situation where my Mum had told me to continue mopping and she’d bail out the water, but I’m looking around seeing more water coming in, knowing I really need to start moving stuff.
But my Mum had given me this order.
But we really needed to move those carpets.
But Mum told me X.
But I really should do Y.
Eventually I left the room to try again to ask my twin what was happening and to recalibrate what I needed to do.

I have never been drenched before. It was raining so heavily that it soaked through the raincoat and my clothes. In less than 5 minutes there was so much water, I’m just glad I live in the tropics and it was a warm night because I would have been freezing otherwise.

Finally able to get some info from my twin who was working hard outside with the situation and finally able to try and come up with an attempted plan with Mum to use drainage gravel bags and compost bag as sandbags, and place them around the door and failing as the runoff from the oversaturated garden started flowing through the gaps.

So we grabbed everything we could move as the water came up around our boots, trying to slosh slowly to stop water rippling up to hit shelves we hadn't reached yet. To put it in perspective, again, this room is our library and studio. It holds our archived sketches, scrapbooks, reference materials, book series we love, our collections of old VHS tapes, art supplies - for my sister, fabrics, wools, wood for pyrography - all stuff that is easily damaged by water - not to mention the wooden and chipboard furniture it is housed on and in. So we were on a time limit to save everything destructible that was creeping closer and closer to the waterline.

It became very apparent to me that we needed a pump to get the water out so I told my Mum that as soon as it’s 7:30 am, I’m going to the hardware store to buy a pump because surely we don’t have one because surely my Dad would have thought to get it by now. Turns out we did have a pump, two pumps to be exact and only by me mentioning about going to get a pump did my Dad think to get it out.

So he dug out the pump to save the day only for the power to go out as the water finally reached the electrics in the fridge and tripped the power. (Me and my twin have our own fridge in the studio).

Me and my twin continued to move what items we could and Dad did eventually set up an alternative power outlet that ran unconventionally off the lights rather than the main power and was strung along with extension leads giving the pump power to do its job and the water, finally, started to go down.

After reaching about 6 inches/15cm-ish, the water finally stopped rising, a sliver of victory, and all the stalling tactics we had deployed meant we had time to save the most precious items…but the damage to the floor and some furniture was already too late. We now have a combination of waterlogged cupboards, bookcases, cabinets, floorboards, and carpet that need to be ripped up and tossed away before they spread mold spores everywhere.

As you might guess, that's a lot of physical work, shifting things, removing floorboards, drying what we can to save it and tossing out what we cannot, and the most ‘fun task’ ripping up the slimy rotting carpet...and I can't help with ANY of it because just being in the room gives me an asthma attack. Instead, my sister is doing everything with occasional help from Dad when he isn’t working on the outside, gravelling and concreting to try and make sure we can handle a round 2 if we get hit by more wet weather before the ground has dried out. My mother was helping with packing and keeping the rest of the house running despite her poorly head and bad knee - and sadly has overexerted herself and suffered consecutive migraines so is banned from helping further.

So here I am, only just recovering from my own migraines from just the stress of the situation, and I am trying to support the family how I can. So far the most helpful thing I’ve done is hand my sister my wallet so she could buy what she needed to fix up the floor. Similarly, I am planning on buying dinner for my family this evening so they don’t have to try and cook something. Right now, that’s the only thing I can offer to help with - paying for stuff. Hence, I thought, the one thing I COULD do in the meantime is open commissions specifically to help with paying for the repairs and keeping my exhausted family sane and fed.

So if you are interested, please reply to this journal, or send me a private message.

My commission prices are here - https://sheezy.art/eternity9/journal/commissions-open-2025

Also I have a Ko-Fi if people just want to donate
https://ko-fi.com/eternity9