I think I can speak for most of us when I ask “ What the f**k Mother Nature?!” Damn bitch is crabby.
I’m gonna be all over the place here so hang with me.... I will attempt to finish a thought but it’s going to be tough.
So, I love my house. This house. 1223 Rhinehart. This fricking house of mine. The one that Husband and I have put blood, sweat, tears and YEARS of labor in to. Can I call it a labor of love? Possibly....
I have to stop confusing Mother Nature with The House. The two intercepted this week and it was not pretty. Not. Pretty. At. All. And I’ve got the pictures to prove it. So read on.....
I know, poor me. Poor house. Believe me when I say that I know the situation I’m about to describe is peanuts compared to a lot of other shit going on in the world and namely, in our area. I pray for our farmers every day and the wrath of nature they are facing. It is almost unfathomable and unfortunately, that is what I thought of to put my own situation into perspective this week. It doesn’t make it suck any less, but it makes me thankful that I could be in way worse of a scenario and I’m not.
September 20th. Five inches of rain. Little did we know this was just the tip of the iceberg. And the downstairs of my house was the proverbial Titanic.
I want to say that the purpose of this blog post is to HELP someone - anyone - that may be facing or could face this situation. Spring of 2020 could quite possibly affect many of you reading this that live in this area.
I’ll stop babbling now and get on with it.
Facts:
- Our house was built in 1954
- We have a concrete and brick foundation/basement
- Our house does not have drain tile around it
- 1 sump hole in the NW corner
- When we landscaped years back, we did bank up all around the house and have a pretty pronounced slope, moving away from the house.
- Up until September 20th, our sump pump had not ran in about 15 years. Bone dry.
- As of October 15th, said pump runs every 6 minutes.
About a week ago, after many rainy days and the initial 5 inch rainfall and an impending snow storm, we started to worry. Time to take precautions. We bought a fancy, new sump pump with all of the bells and whistles: a back up pump, battery back up, alarm, burglar system, UFO homing device and an intercom that goes directly to the Red Pepper. We also bought a generator and felt like, "alright - we are sitting pretty now and are ready for anything."
Big Blizzard prediction. Snow to be measurable in feet - not inches. But we're ok. We have a fancy new pump, a generator and beer in the fridge... We're good, right?
Think again. Cue the theme music from Jaws
Friday, October 11th. Snow Day. We're having a few friends over and one notices we have a little water at the bottom of the staircase. No biggie. Wipe it up.... It comes right back... What? We search around and.... crap. Seepage underneath the staircase.
Ryan gets out the shop vac, sucks it up and back to our regularly scheduled program of the Sioux game and drinking a few beers. A little seepage.... Not surprising as we know the ground is very saturated. Check it again before bed and there's a little more there but whatever...
Saturday morning. Ryan has a hunch to check the downstairs bedroom in the NE corner of the house and low and behold. The carpet is wet! UGH!!! Is that not one of the WORST feelings ever when you walk on soaked carpet?!?! Son of a gun!!!
So now we have seepage under the stairs towards the SE corner of our house and seepage in the bedroom in the NE corner of the house. Our sump hole is located in the NW corner of the house.
Under the stairs the water is pooling and it's leaking out into the hallway again.
Now the hallway closet is starting to weep (and so am I) and the back bedroom seems to have a river running through it. What is going on?!
So we start wet vac'ing… We borrow a 2nd one and quickly seem to get into a routine of wet vac'ing at the top of every hour. By sticking with a schedule, we can somewhat measure if the situation is remaining the same or if the water is increasing. It's steadily increasing. We were wet vac'ing at the top of every hour, around the clock for THREE days and becoming completely exhausted and defeated. We proactively rolled up the living room carpet and prepared for our basement to turn into a swimming pool.
We decided to try and sink a sump hole right outside of our house to try and draw the water away. We dug in a couple of different areas right next to the house and.... it was dry! What?! 5 feet down and nothing. How can that be? Two words: Hydrostatic Pressure. I could bore you with the technical definition but basically what hydrostatic pressure does is drive groundwater into the basement through gaps and cracks in the masonry. Even a well-constructed basement foundation can't provide a perfect barrier against hydrostatic pressure. Water always finds an opening. High water pressure can also cause seepage through solid concrete. (www.basementsystems.com)
So we start wet vac'ing… We borrow a 2nd one and quickly seem to get into a routine of wet vac'ing at the top of every hour. By sticking with a schedule, we can somewhat measure if the situation is remaining the same or if the water is increasing. It's steadily increasing. We were wet vac'ing at the top of every hour, around the clock for THREE days and becoming completely exhausted and defeated. We proactively rolled up the living room carpet and prepared for our basement to turn into a swimming pool.
We decided to try and sink a sump hole right outside of our house to try and draw the water away. We dug in a couple of different areas right next to the house and.... it was dry! What?! 5 feet down and nothing. How can that be? Two words: Hydrostatic Pressure. I could bore you with the technical definition but basically what hydrostatic pressure does is drive groundwater into the basement through gaps and cracks in the masonry. Even a well-constructed basement foundation can't provide a perfect barrier against hydrostatic pressure. Water always finds an opening. High water pressure can also cause seepage through solid concrete. (www.basementsystems.com)
It's amazing how much a person can learn at my age in the matter of a few hours. Hydrostatic Pressure are now cuss words in this house.
Monday morning I started calling around for someone to come and put drain tile on the outside of our house. We were still convinced that this was what needed to be done. I called a friend of ours that did all of our concrete work when we remodeled our house. I left him a voicemail just asking for him to point me in the right direction as we were grasping at straws. Praise the good Lord, he called back. Turns out he was fighting the same fight at his house and he told us we needed to sink a sump hole INSIDE our house. He also had an electric jackhammer we could borrow if we needed it.
While I'm on the phone with him, poor Ryan is wrecking our laundry room floor, trying to create a trench from the seepage under the stairs to the floor drain.
It didn't work and he was about to lose his mind. We were seriously at our wits end. The water was starting to come in so fast that we could hardly keep up. I told him what our friend, Elliot, from K & E Construction just told me and we decided we needed to just go for it. At this point, I don't care how messy my downstairs gets - we just need to keep this water the hell out!
Time to get down and dirty.
Meet our newest best friend: Jack Hammer.
We actually did the sump hole under the stairs first but it was so dirty and dusty in there that I couldn't see a thing and could hardly breathe so I did not get any photos of the process.
End result:
A smaller version of a sump hole with a 5 gallon pail. Because, of course, another snag... as Ryan was digging out the hole to put in the sump well, there was what was either a gas line or water line in the way so he was able to stick a 5 gallon pail and the sump pump beside it. Anyways... it WORKED! The seepage started to fill up the hole rather than come through the walls and floor. Finally... a win! More tears.. this time of joy. And because of the jackhammer dust.
Current situation: Permanent sump hole in the back bedroom. We have the hose running out the window to the curb right now but Ryan is going to eventually cut a hole and run it out of the rim joist.
Once he's able to complete that, then we'll build a built-in cabinet/nightstand to conceal the pump like we did with our main sump pump in the living room:
As I am sitting here typing this today, October 18th, it's been exactly one week since the nightmare began. I'm sicker than a dog and I'm sure it's due to the stress, lack of sleep and abundance of cement dust I've inhaled. My downstairs looks like a war zone but, it's DRY.
I wanted to post this as soon as I could because if this can help even one person, then I've done my job. I'm not saying that this is the solution for everyone but it definitely is for many. In fact, Ryan already helped one of our friends do the same thing at their house and it worked out just as well.....pun intended 😉
Like I said earlier, we know this pales in comparison to so many other situations happening right now. We pray daily for our farming community and hope there's a light and better days ahead. There's a saying that, "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" and I do believe that... I think He just needs to test our strength and our faith every once in a while and this situation, for us, was just that.
