Last night it started raining around 9pm in Raleigh. It was a hot day and thunderstorms were forecasted for the evening hours. Caitlin and I had just returned to our apartment from a massive trip to Walmart a few hours earlier. This was before it started to look stormy. We had dinner and I began to watch the Pens game (GO PENS!). It started to get VERY stormy outside and then the sky finally opened up with a torrential downpour. It continued to rain until I went to bed at around 1AM. According to weather.com, it rained 1.54″ overnight.

This morning I woke up, got breakfast, and headed out to work. As I approached my car parked outside of my apartment, something looked weird. MY SUNROOF WAS OPEN! Ohh man. I thought back to last night was I was saying, “Geez, we must have gotten 2 inches of rain last night. No biking for awhile…”. Suddenly biking this afternoon became less important. I quickly unlocked my car to find a good 1.5″ of water in my center console cupholders. The seats are leather and didn’t look THAT wet. Luckily I had closed the windows so the water didn’t appear to get into any of the electronics on the doors or dashboard. There was still a considerable amount of water in the center console and on the carpet. I grabbed two towels out of the trunk and cleaned up some of the puddles and headed to work. I decided to leave my car in the parking lot with the windows and sunroof open to let it air out. Of course this led to religiously checking the Doppler radar to make sure more rain wasn’t coming. That’d be ironic, ey?

After work (my car wasn’t stolen, thankfully) I noticed that the leather on my seats was very tough in spots. You can see in the photo below exactly where the water was because there is a distinct line in the seat separating the soft leather from the tough leather. I still need to research this more but I think I just need to condition it. I’m hopeful that it’ll be back to normal soon!

I managed to clean out my car really good and noticed that the majority of the water was on the floor mat in the back. As you can tell from the picture, this was dripping water like CRAZY! I’m going to keep this on the deck for a few days to dry out.

I loaded up the car with 7 Damp Rid moisture absorbers to hopefully prevent mold and mildew. The hanging kind worked pretty well and I also got some of the small bucket kind, too. I’m excited to take a look tomorrow and see how much water they absorbed.

Moral of the story- double check that sunroof before you leave the car. It can cause you A LOT of pain and suffering!

#roughday