A pile of sodden Mass cards provided a reminder that the flood was the second blow to the Melhorn home in recent days.
Two weeks earlier Terence Melhorn had buried his 84-year-old father and now his elderly mother was in emergency accommodation across the city, a reluctant refugee from the havoc wreaked on her Hawthorn Terrace home in East Wall, Dublin.
"I only let her in as far as the hallway. She doesn't need to see the rest yet. She's heartbroken," said Terence, squelching his way into his mother's soaked ground-floor bedroom.
A few streets away pensioner Joseph Grant was also worrying about the reaction of his wife, Josephine, who was due home from hospital on Saturday.
"They're going to keep her in until Monday, but I don't know what we'll do then," he said, as the younger two generations of their family scrubbed and mopped around him.
"By the time I got to my parents' house, it was up to here," said their daughter, Mary, indicating a thigh-high level.
"Everything exploded, the fridge, the heating units. The place was full of smoke, and I ran out and shouted for help. The fire brigade was shouting to turn off the trip switch. I don't know how the place didn't burn down. I thought it was gone."
Similar stories of fright and confusion came from south of the Liffey in Stella Gardens, the worst-affected area in Ringsend.
Time and again, here and in East Wall, people fortunate enough to have added an upstairs extension or modern floor coverings or new wiring passed off their own losses and expressed concern instead for the many elderly residents of these old Dublin communities, whose homes will require extensive refurbishment.