We almost needed to abandon ship today. It's true. Well, as true as that statement can be when applied to a house. A house filling with water.
Aye-Aye, Captain. Full speed ahead.
Whenever there's a massive rain, we get dampness in the basement. We have it taken care of to the point where it's not a big deal. It never happens when there's time for it, of course, but it's at least not a big deal.
After last night's monstrosity of a storm falling on thick masses of melting snow, I was prepared for a wet basement. What I found was a slowly sinking ship.
A thumb-sized hole had sprung on the wall, allowing a stream of water to come gushing out. Unending. Constant. Watery.
I was completely dumbfounded by this new occurrence and enjoyed a moment of the absurd by sticking my thumb into the hole to see if I could plug it and if water would then spurt out of some other hole that would pop through the wall, a la cartoon style. (It didn't).
There was simply no stopping this liquid event; too much standing water stood ready to push its way in from the back of the house. So we created a conduit to take the water to the drain. A piece of white molded plastic, supported by wood, was angled from the hole to the bucket of our Shop Vac. As the bucket fills, it reaches the hose entrance and then drains through there. The hose leads directly to the drain. Voila, all fixed. For now. There is still a grievous amount coming up through the floor in one spot, and we can't do much with that other than to let it go and occasionally sweep the whole lot into the drain.
This means more work for me, naturally. After the water decides to stay out of our basement, there will be the fun of bleaching the joint out and making sure we don't start a colony of some new mold down there. Can't say I'm looking forward to that. But it's all good, right? I could see this as a nasty bit of trickery on our house's part. Or I could just see it as a Monday.
See what Monday can do?
No comments:
Post a Comment