… has been wet. Very wet.
We had a massive rain storm here in MA. The sort of thing that, had it been a month ago, would have been a blizzard.
We got very, very lucky, in large part thanks to our cat Mal.
Mal gets lonely. He can only go a few hours without some sort of attention. So, he usually wakes me up at 5am. I pet him a bit, get out of bed and feed him, then go back to sleep.
The rain started on Saturday night. When Mal woke me up Sunday morning I figured I might as well check the basement.
Oh man.
Wet wet wet.
Not too bad yet. Maybe 1/2″ across the whole floor, but coming in steadily. There were spurts of water shooting up from the floor.
Checked the Home Depot web site and saw that they opened at 8. For the next 2 hours I vacuumed up water pretty much non stop.
We got to the Depot right around opening time. They had pumps! Yay! We picked up 2 automatic pumps. They come on and off regularly to suck up any water that may happen to be around. We grabbed the hoses conveniently located right on the same table, right inside the contractor entrance to the store.
It turns out that the hoses we got did NOT work with the pumps. We needed garden hoses for ours.
I cannibalized the one we actually had for our garden while Jodi headed out to get another. By the time she got there the pumps were gone.
Had we been 30 minutes later, we would not have gotten the pumps that saved our butts. Thank you Mal!!
The remainder of the day was spent chasing water. While at the depot I had picked up some epoxy putty to plug the biggest holes. I went with this rather than hydraulic cement since we were attempting to plug things that were completely submerged, and I knew the putty would do it.
That managed to slow the creeping water a bit, keeping us from floating away.
We found that we were getting between 1 and 2 inches of water per hour, even with the 2 pumps going.
Because our basement floor is crazily out of level, there were areas where the water would pool up pretty deep, but not flow to the pump. Jodi came up with a great system of pushing the water around with push brooms to shove it into the pumps.
Now, that part about 1-2 inches per hour? The way we held it back was to do this pushing dance every hour. Around the clock. Ugh.
Oh, and we had to strip the paneling and insulation off the basement walls to get access to the leaks.
Monday I called in wet to work. I went out to the Depot again right at opening time for hydraulic cement. Now that the gushing water was gone and we were keeping the levels low, I was able to go that route. They had 8 50 pound buckets in stock. Not knowing what I needed I bought 6 of them.
The next 24 hours was pretty much cementing the perimeter of the house with this stuff that you mix up in roughly baseball sized portions. It ended up taking 2 buckets to plug all of the leaks. Yup, 100 pounds of baseballs.
Today was another no-work day, as we still had puddles everywhere, pumps running full force, and a HUGE mess to clean up.
In the interest of mold prevention I spent the day cleaning, vacuuming, replacing shelves with new metal ones on wheels, and generally making sure that there weren’t hidden puddles to fester.
Later in the evening I picked up a 5 gallon bucket of Drylok, a paint for waterproofing masonry. Imaging painting a very, very rough surface with a 4″ brush. Now imagine that you are using pancake batter as your paint. Yeah, fun.
But, I was able to do 2 coats of Drylok on the wall where the bench lives and put the insulation / paneling back. This wasn’t so much for workspace benefit as it was to get access to one of the last big puddles… right under the bench.
Now, it’s bed time. And when I wake up tomorrow I will shower and go to work like a civilized person.
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