A few years back, I was selling a house for one of my clients. They had already moved out of state and now it was the day of the buyers' walk through. I went over to the house early to make sure everything was as it should be.
When I went down to the basement, I think my heart stopped for a minute! The basement was flooded! I mean it was time to get the waders on! I couldn't understand how this much water could have come in. No time to wonder!
One of my friends lived in an adjacent house. I ran over to her house and asked if I could borrow their wet-dry vac. I rolled the vac down the sidewalk, into my clients' house and down to the basement. I did pause to think about how to plug it in while standing in ankle deep water. No worries! I plugged it in to an extension cord upstairs.
Unfortunately, there was no sump pump and no laundry sink. Yep! That means I had to haul the water up the stairs to dump it out. I cannot even remember how many trips I made up and down those stairs. It was surely pure adrenaline that carried me through. I felt like I was on an episode of "I Love Lucy".
Somehow I managed to get the water out of that basement. It took a few hours. I kept thinking to myself "I must be the only agent who would do this!"
As for the cause of the water? Long story short...I later found out that the buyers' had trespassed on the property the day before and ran a hose up to the roof to make sure the gutters had been cleaned. Unfortunately, when they finished their "test", they did not shut off the hose completely and left it running all afternoon and overnight. Guess where? Right at the lip of the basement window.
That's my Above and Beyond Story aka "What I Would Do For My Clients"!
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