How to clean your basement

1) Find a cool place to live right next to a huge park.

2) Make sure whoever installed the sprinklers for said park does shoddy work.

3) Move into house that has incorrectly installed sprinkler main for the park right next to basement window well.

4) Lie in bed listening to peaceful sound of rain early one morning. Preferably a Tuesday morning at about 7 AM.

5) Wait... it's not raining! Run down the stairs to discover 6 inches of standing water in your basement.

6) Put shoes on. The window well filling up with water will put enough pressure to break even a double-paned window.

7) Quickly move everything irreplaceable up to your 2nd story bedroom.

8) Keep removing the leaf bits/other debris that keeps clogging the drain. The drain that is stationed at a high spot on the basement floor.

9) Carefully pick up all visible shards of glass and place in unused plastic trash can.

10) Not-so-quickly begin the process of moving everything else upstairs.

11) Take a breakfast break.

12) Feel overwhelmed. Carry one thing around while you pace the basement trying to figure out what to do next.

13) Greet the landlord and his general-contracting/carpet cleaning buddy, Von, as they come survey the damage.

14) Direct the extra hands the landlord brings in to help move stuff around.

15) Move love-sack into upstairs hallway (where you will have to jump over it every time you want to go in or out of your room) to make more room in the living room for boxes.

16) Once basement is empty and the cement has sucked up all the water it can, sweep to get as much debris off of the floor as possible.

17) Watch an episode of Scrubs and eat lunch while Von 'power cleans' the basement with his carpet-cleaning equipment.

18) Begin long process of washing all fabric items that got flooded.

19) Leave carpet-drying fans in basement for 4 days straight.

20) Step back and enjoy how clean your basement is!