Last week I may have promised an update on the main living sections of the house. I definitely intended to take my after pictures and show the wonderful, but messy, results we have so far. However, shit happened (as it usually does).
The weather finally started to warm up a bit, and I had about five minutes to enjoy the above freezing temperatures before the flooding starting. Thursday night I was curled up reading a book when Casey got home and went out to the shop to unload the truck. Two minutes later he is back inside, telling me to get my shoes on and come help him because the shop is flooding. Fan-fucking-tastic. While the house is in this demo phase we have just about all of our furniture hanging out in the front corner of the shop: couches, bookshelves, tables, chairs, boxes, about 3/4 of the crap we own. I will give you three guesses as to which corner of the shop was flooding (which is very generous of me considering there are only four corners). If you guessed the corner with all of our furniture, you would be correct. We spent the next hour or two moving everything to the middle of the shop and trying our best to remove the water. I was a little to busy trying to save my couch to take a before picture, so this is all I got:
I know, not a huge flood, but when we started we had a good three inches or so of water in that back corner. After we got the shop mostly under control we decided it would probably be a good idea to check the crawl space for flooding. It was.
We attempted to solve this by hooking a garden hose to the shop vac. We managed to fill the 10 gallon vacuum five or six times over an hour or so, and gave up when the water had barely moved an inch. I did try and buy a sump pump, but pretty much everywhere was sold out or only had super industrial $200 ones left. Good news: Casey’s brother saved the day by bringing us an extra sump pump he had on hand, and all of the water was cleared out in about 10 minutes.
Most of these flooding issues can be attributed to the terrible grading on our property and the huge amount of snow that inconveniently dumps off of the roof right next to house to melt into the foundation. Here are some pictures of the snow dump.
All of that needs to be shoveled away from the house to prevent the crawl space from totally flooding. My arms feel like they are going to fall off, and we’ve barely made a dent.
I don’t have any pictures of the driveway, which cause me some big problems on Saturday. Our house is down a communal driveway with 3 or 4 houses, and it’s slanted down from the road. Our personal driveway is slanted down from the communal driveway. For those of you that haven’t guessed, this means that all of the snow melt from the road, communal driveway, and our driveway flows right into the shop – which is apparently the low point in the driveway. I was attending to the shop while Casey was at work on Saturday, and even after I had sand bags across the front of the shop the water was flowing in faster than I could suck it up. I ended up spending a couple hours digging trenches in solid ice to divert the water, first away from the shop to solve the immediate problem and then later across the communal driveway to divert the water into the front yard instead of the driveway. Pictures probably would have made that a little more understandable, but I managed to get busy enough to completely forget about taking pictures.
Long story short, this property is terribly designed and we have a serious snow melt issue. I still have more snow to shovel than I would like to admit, but it seems that we have the main problem areas under control for now. I will get around to posting updates on the inside of the house after the snow shoveling is done. I hate shoveling snow.