Just as I announce my triumphant return to blogging, I go and leave it for two weeks. I do have a good excuse though... several actually.
#1: packing
#2: moving
#3: cleaning rental house
#4: youth group lock-in
#5: no internet for five days
Those are good excuses, right?
So now I am sitting in our new family room recovering from my first official "home owner" experience. As some of you may know, my husband and I are the kind of people who are crazy enough to buy a house with a moldy basement. We gutted said basement before we moved in and are in the process of getting it treated so that it is 100% mold free (right now it's probably about 92% mold free). We were fairly certain before we bought the house that we knew how the water that caused the mold got into the basement. Now we know for sure.
Apparently, someone who had no idea what they were doing only buried about two feet of hose for the downspout off of the addition. This downspout happens to be just uphill from the basement window well, so when it rains really hard (like it did this evening) the ground becomes completely saturated and the window well floods from underneath. Not cool.
First we noticed a "drip, drip, drip" coming from the basement and went down there to find water running over the windowsill into a growing puddle on the floor. Upon further inspection we found a water line on the glass and our jaws dropped as we realized that there were at least 8 inches of water in the window well. We ended up traipsing out into the rain with a shop vac to suck the nasty, muddy water out of the window well. We kept count and by the time we finished, we had sucked out over 100 gallons of water. Whoa.
We both got soaking wet, laughed a lot, and cursed the idiot who didn't bury a longer drainpipe! Even though this all sounds pretty awful, here is the good news:
- it happened before we refinished the basement
- we heard the dripping before we ended up with 100 gallons of water inside the house
- we figured out how the water got into the window well/basement
- we figured out how to fix the problem
- it's going to be relatively easy (and inexpensive!)
Now we just need to figure out when we're going to have time to fix it...
2 comments:
Congratulations and welcome to the home ownership experience. Now you know what mom and I have dealt with to some degree over the years of owning 6 homes...and...FYI...just because you build a new home doesn't mean there aren't issues.
It's interesting that the window well fills from ground water and not run off. Yeah...run a French drain (solid pipe...not slotted) as far as you can so the drainage is away from the house...the opening of the pipe that is and be sure it has a downhill slope so it can't back fill.
As far as "have time to fix it" it's more like, "MAKE TIME to fix it."
Sorry for the diatribe, but I'm just being good ol' Dad.
We too have a home with "issues". We sometimes think of moving, but at least we know what this issues with this house are, hee, hee. Get the water going downhill away from your house and you should be in good shape.
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