Instructors Draft For the Autobiographical Narrative

This is my instructors draft for the autobiographical narrative. It's the next step to my first completed college paper. As you can see there are next to no changes from my peer review draft. If you have any changes you think I should make, or any comments, then leave a comment.

Story

1

Seth

Mrs.

English 101

September 1, 2013

Autobiographical Narrative

It was midnight. I woke up. I quickly climbed out of my bed and ran down the stairs. I heard my

Mom screaming at the top of her lungs, “Turn it off!! Turn it off!!” My Dad and siblings were rapidly approaching me from behind. We were all wondering what was going on as we rushed to my Mom. “Turn off the water.” she screamed as we made it to her. My Dad rushed down the stairs into the basement. The water was up past his ankles. There was water dripping from the ceiling onto him just as though it was raining. My Mom was still screaming. My brother, sister and I were trying to figure out what we were going to do. There was so much water this time.

Our house had flooded before because of the washing machine, but never this bad. This time there was water covering the first floor and filling the basement. Once just recently the washing machine had backed up and flooded the basement, but that just required us to replace the floor and some drywall in the basement. This time it was way worse.

My Mom was out of her mind. She could see all of the damage that was done and it was driving her insane. My Dad came up the stairs after he had turned off the water. He began trying to calm her. I got my brother and sister and we started moving stuff upstairs into the garage in order to salvage as much as we could. First came the pictures. Most of the containers had been filled with water. We knew we were going to lose a lot of them and we tried to hide it from my Mom as my Dad continued to calm her. Next came all of the bins of clothing, then the boxes that contained the things my Mom wanted to remember from when we were little. Finally we started bringing out the food and other miscellaneous items. Moving all of this stuff to the garage took what felt like hours and hours of work, but we finished in just over two hours.

For the first hour there was still water dripping from the basement ceiling. It felt like it was raining on us as we trudged through the water and carried everything up to the garage. We were exhausted from carrying everything up the flight of stairs. It was two o'clock in the morning. I had a full day of work starting at eight that morning. We thought we were done, but we had to continue to work. All of the china, the dishes from lower cabinets, and books from my moms office had to be carried up into our bonus room on the second story. About an hour later we had finished all of that. Everyone was extremely tired.

My Mom had been frantically making phone calls trying to find a company to come and start drying everything out. Once all of our belongings were in a safe place we began trying to get the water out of our house. We started using our shop vacuum to suck up all of the water in the basement. Lucky for us after the water had stopped pouring into the basement it started to drain through the sub pump. On the first floor we were using squeegees to push the water out the front and back doors.

At four o'clock a company called Serv-pro showed up. They began moving their equipment into our house. We had all of the standing water out, but now they had to get everything below the floor, in the walls, in the ceilings, and in the carpet dried out.

My Dad and I began looking for what caused all of the destruction. We looked for a leak from the washer. We looked at the face of the washer. We looked where the hose connects to the faucet, and where the hose connects to the washer. We didn't find anything. We were tired and couldn't think of where it could be. We knew it was the washer, but where?

It was five o'clock in the morning. I had to be at work in three hours. I was sent to get a shower and to try and get some sleep. I woke up a few minutes before I had to leave. I got dressed and went to

work.

When I got home that night I had a lot of questions to ask about the house. My parents had a lot of answers, but not all of them. There were a lot of fans and dehumidifiers. The house was hot and loud. When I got home I discovered that we had lost our furnace. There was no way of cooling the house. It was hot outside, and supposed to be hotter the next day. The house was almost 96 degrees upstairs. It was loud everywhere in the house. The sound of the fans echoed throughout.

My Dad figured out during the day that the hose to the washer is what caused the flooding. The pressure through it was to high and had caused it to burst. After 9/11 it became a government mandate to put a compression tank on all water heaters. The point of the compression tank is to prevent people from being able to pump anything into the cities water supply. Our compression tank, which is supposed to be filled with air, was filled with water. There was no way for the system to regulate the pressure and it caused the hose to burst. It was decided that there were about 3600 gallons of water that had spewed from the hose into our house.

We spent that first night in a hotel. We didn't know that we'd be spending the next four weeks in a hotel as we waited for our house to be dried out, and a furnace to be put in. It was almost like moving out of our house. We had to box everything up that was on the first floor and in the basement. We had to load everything into trucks and bring it to a storage unit.

There was a lot of demolition that had to be done. The basement ceiling needed to be torn out and the flooring on the first floor needed to all come out, then we needed to fix what we had demolished. Serv-pro took out the tile on the first floor. We had to remove the basement ceiling, all of the carpet, and all of the hardwood on the first floor.

It was hard to achieve, or make progress on the house during the summer because someone was at a camp almost every week. That meant more work for everyone else. When we were home we couldn't do things with our friends, because we had to work at our house with our free time. Overall it made our summer much worse then we had expected.

The flood happened almost three months ago now. We've been mostly grilling out, or eating out. We have no kitchen, just a refrigerator. We've learned a lot about contracting, construction, and handling money.

While losing so much seems like a bad thing. There are many good things that can be found as well. We have been able to update many things in our house. We were able to rewire things that had bothered my parents since we moved in. Yes it has been a lot of work, but it's been worth it so far.

Life can be very trying for anyone. If you can't find any good, then it will be even more trying. This experience could have been a very bad one for my family. If we just focused on everything we lost, and ignored what we had gained these last months would have been very depressing.

Conclusion 

Thank you for reading my paper. I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to follow me on instagram or twitter @seth_pickel