“When it rains, it pours” is much more than a cliche these days for Brian and Brenda Carter of Easley.

The Carters and friends spent Thursday moving the family’s furniture to a storage unit just in case Hurricane Ivan’s rains push more water into their Upstate house a week after Hurricane Frances ruined the carpet.

The National Weather Service expects up to 14 inches of rain in some mountain areas along the N.C.-S.C. line in the 48 hours ending early Saturday.

“I’m expecting a lot worse than last time,” said Brian Carter, who understandably has difficulty mustering optimism.

Carter was laid off from his job two weeks ago. “Then my car breaks down and my dog gets sick. Then this. It’s hard to keep yourself in a positive, upbeat mood. But you just keep going. You just have to take the cards that life deals you.”

So the Carter family put as much of their stuff as possible in the attic Thursday, took the big furniture to a storage warehouse and hoped for the best.

Emergency officials in Upstate counties said all they could do was make sure families who were flooded last week were aware they could get another blast this weekend.

“When you get these 100-year floods, there’s just not much you can do for them,” said Don Evett, director of the Pickens County Emergency Management Department.

The Carters live in one of two homes in the Quail Haven subdivision that flooded last week. Several mobile homes nearby also suffered flooding as nearly a foot of rain drained down the mountains and squeezed through the Saluda River corridor.

In nearby Greenville County, several homes flooded in the Riverview subdivision. In Oconee County, the worst damage was to one home on Shrine Club Road between Seneca and Walhalla.

The Shrine Club Road residents haven’t been able to get back to their house and are staying in a hotel, said Henry Gordon, director of the Oconee County Emergency Management Agency.

Most of the flooded families can empathize with the Carters. They watched helplessly last week as water backed up in a creek that drains into the Saluda.

“It surrounded us, then it started to seep in,” Carter said. “It never came rushing in, but we were walking around and you could feel that the carpet was starting to suck up water.”

When the floodwaters receded, the Carters pulled out the carpet and used wet vacuums to dry off the concrete slab. They felt fortunate the water didn’t rise enough to damage the Sheetrock walls. They have no flood insurance for the 1,500-square foot ranch house, and replacing the carpet will be enough of a strain on the bank account.

In the Riverview subdivision near Greenville, William Daniels put his furniture up as high as possible last weekend, stacking it on sawhorses or old tables when the Saluda River started oozing out of the nearby forest.

“When it comes out of the woods and starts to cross the road, we’re in trouble,” said Daniels, who saw a similar march after a tropical storm in 1995.

He and his wife had to evacuate their house last week, but the water never got above the home’s crawl space. Several nearby homes were in similar situations, he said.

Daniels didn’t bother to take some of the furniture down from the flood perches, realizing another storm could be on the way. He will monitor the water today, ready to lift more furniture.

Only a handful of homes in each county were damaged by the Frances floods.

However, the flooding caused massive road problems, including about $1 million in damage in Pickens County, Evett said.

Oconee County officials spent much of the week repairing some of the 35 roads closed by flooding last week, but it will be much longer before a collapsed section of Davis Creek Road is back in working order, Gordon said.

But he was happy that two subdivisions near Seneca, which typically flooded after heavy rains, remained dry last weekend.

“We’ve done a lot of work to mitigate flooding in those areas, putting in new culverts and things like that,” Gordon said.

That work to lessen flood damage, along with the patience of flooded homeowners, will be tested this weekend.

Reach Holleman at (803) 771-8366 or jholleman@thestate.com.