My house was built in 1956. If you look at the picture of the shed, the tree line you see behind it is located at the shoulder of a 40' tall hill that slopes down to the river, where my property ends. Despite the fact that even though every year or two the river takes over the backyard and leaves us only two ways out of the neighborhood, which is to swim or boat, the house never flooded. Not once. Until 2017 when the Big River watershed got 12" of rain in less than 48 hours. River level records set in 1913 were broken. By 4'. For 3 days my house had a foot of water in it. We lost all but our most important possessions and spent 6 months living in a friend's basement while I gutted my house from the floor joist up. If it was under water or in the house while the house had river water in it for 3 days it got thrown in a dumpster. Every piece of drywall, every bit of electrical and plumbing, the floor joists ( I had bottle jacks holding up interior walls while I replaced the joists). From the electric pole in, from the septic tank in and from the well head in were all replaced. I removed walls, added french doors and sliding doors, completely re-designed the house. In short, only the exterior walls survived and then only because due to FEMA floodway rules if 50% of the house is destroyed it has to come down. And there is no rebuilding in a flood way. Yes I had flood insurance. It isn't a valued policy though. They came in and assessed the damage and awarded us 24k because they said we could just cut out the bottom 1' of drywall. They wouldn't replace the floor, the insulation, any of our possessions, nada. I had to take out a 40k loan to pay for the material I needed to do the work because there is no way in hell anything that sat in that house for 3 days being permeated by the smell of river flood water was going to remain if I was going to stay there. Which since I am a couple years away from the house being paid off, I was kinda stuck. Being a carpenter/contractor most of my adult life I did all the work myself. It took 6 months of coming here after work all week, working until about 11 then driving back up to my friend's house to sleep, getting up and doing it over again. And we just stayed here sleeping wherever on the weekends. I also own the house down the street that my daughter lives in, which thankfully is a block home, so we just threw everything away, power washed it and started over.
So now the house is the way I would have built it instead of the way some dude in 1956 built it. And we are dramatically overinsured, with a valued contents policy.
When we knew the house was getting wet I took all my musical equipment, PA rig, bass and guitar amps and cabs and loaded them into my van, which I then pulled on to my 16' trailer, hooked to my truck and parked on the highest spot I could find. Guitars, guns, computers and photographs and other important stuff was hauled up into the attic through a 3x3 hatch. Unloading the attic after the flood looked like clowns getting out of a clown car and required a 4 person assembly line operation. Everything else we owned was either destroyed by the flood or permanently infused with the smell of a million septic tanks which mingled with the river as it flooded out the valley.
So, I bought a nice, prebuilt Cooks portable 12x20 shed, used for $800 then spent about $1300 raising it up 2' higher than the 2017 flood level. In the unlikely event that we have a repeat performance all of our important things will go to the shed instead of the menagerie we had going on through attic hatches and backs of vans in 2017.
! I've been using it for 7 years now.
? I have a vise that mounts on a receiver hitch and have an under side mount on the table so it can be removed. Just a piece of 2" square tubing recepticle.
