March 19, 2007
Owning a home so far sucks...literally.
This past Friday afternoon was the first time our contractor was at the house to start working. As his first project, he was going to jack up the house and begin straightening all the floors, adding new columns to support the floors and adding joist hangers to the first floor for extra support. The basement steps are falling apart as well so I assume that is on the short list too, but to start the project he had to go into the basement. Dave's phone rings...
"Dave, it's Bill. I hate to do this, but I have some bad news. There is two feet of water in the basement."
Crap.
Did I mention that the foundation is cracked severely in one corner, there are no gutters and a few spots where the previous owners intentionally channeled water into the basement? Oh and the basement steps don't have standard Bilco covers to keep the rain and snow out. All changing, but not yet, therefore water is not a surprise.
I know Bill could have done it, but leaving it to him would have meant leaving the water there all weekend and killing half a day of work for him before he could even start. So on Friday night I headed up there after work armed with a submersible pump and 50 feet of 2" industrial hose, along with warm clothes and snacks.
After fashioning a makeshift gutter to direct most of the water out to the drainage ditch, I setup shop inside the house and dropped the pump into the abyss that was formerly my basement. The water reached up above the third step (which was ok since the bottom two are broken anyhow) and I settled in to sit in the empty house watching the water pump out using only two shop lights and a flashlight to guide me. It ended up taking over four hours to remove most of the water, that I estimate was about 28 inches deep. The entire surface had frozen so there was creaking ice cracking along the walls of the basement the entire time I was there which did nothing to reduce the "creepy" factor of sitting in a flooded dark basement all Friday night.
In the end I was able to get out all but the last 1/2 inch before I gave up due to being hungry, tired and fed up with sitting there. It was a good thing I left when I did because while I was inside the house a snowstorm blew in and was dropping snow fast. By the next morning we had somewhere between 12-18 inches of new snow. Ugh.
Anyway, it will all be fine and we will get all the leaks repaired soon but it was definitely not how I wanted to spend my Friday night. :(
Comments
wow. i came to your post to read about the jacking up of the house, because we're days away from finding out whether that's going to happen (and we're *living* in our crooked house). i'm SO sorry to hear about your flooded basement! i have basementphobia, so my husband would have been the one to have dealt with that. and if he'd have been out of town, well, i'd have paid someone else to do it. ew. shudder. you're a good man.