High and Dry

It's been a good test of our new sump pump system the past couple of days. Very heavy rains + dry basement = Hurrah! Well, dry after Joe fixed the hot water faucet to the washing machine. Who knows how long THAT had been dripping. I'm expecting the water bill to go down next month.

They were in and out pretty quickly. Monday they had everything we'd piled up in the middle sheeted off, and all the concrete pulled out from the walls.

By Tuesday, they'd had everything cleaned up and put in the tiling and backfill.

And they poured cement on Wednesday and were out of there.

There was even some flooding going on in the area Thursday night, and we didn't even hear the thing kick on. It is super-quiet. However, the pump drains basically into our neighbors' driveway, and they were naturally a little concerned about this, so we'll have to do some more tiling and landscaping to get it to run elsewhere. But the amount of water that's coming out of this thing: wow. That would have all stayed in the basement walls, etc. so this is a MAJOR improvement. I shot those last couple shots to kinda highlight the damage the walls have taken. In the first, you can kinda see the bulge in the wall from the backyard, and in the second...well, that looks a little worse because it hasn't been painted in the last 30 years since there was a set of shelves there, but it's pretty bad, with the damage from the roots of the cedar trees we took out last spring. Who plants a tree a foot from their foundation? Idiots.

Next step, Joe is looking into wall anchors while we wait for the electrical guys to get down and set up the switch over to breakers instead of fuses. They have to trench in the power cable in order for this to happen (stupid upgrade to current code), so that all has to be coordinated too. Joe wants to wait to do the wall anchors until after this is done, which doesn't make sense to me, but I'm not doing the digging, so I'm deferring to what makes sense to him. (He trusts himself not to hit the power cable more than he trusts MidAmerican not to hit the wall anchors.) I'm all right with this compromise/pick your battles thing.

Have I said how excited I am to have this process started? Here's to no more nightmares!