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!

Trying to End the Nightmares

I have nightmares about my house being a shack. Like, holes in the floor, wind blowing through the walls, dirt falling through the foundation walls shack. I think it stems from the basement and the problems I've been having over the past several years with water coming in. I mentioned, way back before I abandoned the blog for two years, that I had accepted a bid to put a swale in the backyard to help direct water away from the house, and that has helped *immensely*. Unfortunately, I did it too late, and there was water damage to the foundation walls, especially the west wall adjacent to the back yard, which is bulging in by an inch and a half up and down, and probably more than that parallel to the floor.

We're starting out fixing this by putting in a sump pump system. We currently have nothing of the sort, but some kind of half-ass dam system that one of our estimators told me doesn't even access all the holes in the cinder block, so it's only draining half the water. Maybe half. Anyway, these guys are going to come in and remove the floor all the way around the perimeter of the basement, put in a drainage system and then cover it all back up. Voila! Water mitigation!

Then, Joe is pretty confident he can install wall anchors in the basement walls to pull them back into alignment. This is pretty much a trust exercise for me, because NIGHTMARES, but I figure if I can trust him with my heart, I can trust him with my basement walls.

All this is leading up to finishing the basement. If we end up having a kid, we will need ROOM. Right now, the spare bedroom, always a repository for things I didn't quite know what to do with all of a sudden got ten times worse when Joe moved in. Plus the majority of the stuff in the basement, because I swear there was pretty much nothing down there before I got married. Opinions will vary on that point. But if we have to clean out the spare room to make room for a nursury, there has to be a place for that stuff too, and it would be really nice to have some storage space. Apparently, closets were not a valued commodity in the 1940's.

We've got a pile of items to get rid of; we're planning on having a garage sale sometime soon. Lots of the mound of stuff in the middle of the basement is garage sale things, so that makes me feel a little bit better about the enormity of the task of organizing.

The plan is to have a living room, laundry room, storage and an extra bathroom in the basement, and turn the current living room into a dining room, and have a smaller table in the kitchen for quick eating. Basically, we will almost double our living space. We won't take over the second floor until we have a second kid - the apartment income is designated for Joe's student loans, and we've got a ways to go before those are paid off.

Exciting plans!