LET THERE BE... WATER!
Things were looking up. We'd finally gotten the walls done, and that had allowed us to begin working on the other phases of the house's interior. While waiting for the electrician and the plumber, we'd begun work on the stairs and the floors...
I thought we'd tackle the stairway railing next. That way, the kids and I (Kendall most probably) could put together all the in-between rails and such. Then we could get painting and then putting on the actual wood treads -- assuming that replacement landing ever shows up. But on May 21 Brian showed up wanting to work on more floors. And the floor he wanted to work on was the loft. Despite wanting to get the stairs done, I wasn't about to argue.
He'd prepped the floor (with the blue padding - above) while I was at a lunch meeting. Then he and I began laying out the courses before I had to run off and pick Julie up from her school dance. ( ! ) But the sure-lock no-glue process seemed designed to frustrate my compatriot. When I left, he was cursing and wishing I'd bought the old kind of "whack together" floor. When I got back with Julie, though, he'd figured the system out. He and I snapped the floor together in just about 3 hours -- including the time for the "learning curve" at the beginning.
The kids liked the floor so much, they decided to sleep on it in sleeping bags that night. (See pix above.) The thunderstorms that raged that night (Friday) didn't even wake Kendall. (Though they kept some of the rest of us up.) Brian was coming the next day, and he and I were planning on tackling the stair rails, the rest of the floors, and maybe even the doors. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men...
Our house is perched on a plot of raised land just above the 100 year floodplain -- which runs through our neighbor Dave's back yard. One of these days (maybe tomorrow) I'll take a picture of Dave's yard and show you what it looks like. Well, it'd been raining pretty constantly in Wisconsin for over 2 weeks, straight. Rain every day. Only one day in recent memory with no rain at all. (The day we went to Chocolate Fest in neighboring Burlington.)
I got up that Saturday morning (May 22) and went downstairs, thinking I'd brave the dust and sand the basement walls -- so we could maybe paint them this weekend, along with all the other stuff Brian and I had planned. The pic above is what I saw at the bottom of the new stairway. See the dark spot on the floor to the right? That's water. Water in our new basement. Needless to say, I wasn't pleased. Apparently, we were in the midst of that proverbial 100-year flood.
Still, I wasn't that concerned. Pissed, but not worried. We'd had some "spotting" of water in the corners of the new basement (running in through the old, less-worthy one) during this never-ending bout of rainy days. This was more than that, though. I'm not sure exactly what made me go outside then. (Which is troubling, because, as I'm writing this, that was only yesterday.) Maybe I was getting the paper, maybe I wanted to see if I could determine why there was more water now, or maybe I wanted to bring in some more flooring for that project we were doing today.
In any case, when I got outside, I saw something like the first picture above. See that sand-like stuff? That was previously part of our driveway. See that patch that's just in front of the palette with the pink insulation on it? That used to be a ditch in front of our carport to keep water from running down the driveway into the carport -- and house. Notice how that ditch is pretty much filled in? Guess that thunderstorm was really a flash flood in disguise. It decided to move part of our driveway into the garage so the water could come in and party. See that stuff behind the pink stuff? Valuable construction materials -- including the doors to the house. See the empty space behind the bikes? That's where our flooring was, in the middle of all that mud-silt and water. A very bad thing to wake up to, indeed.
In a fit of manic desperation, I moved the twenty or so boxes of flooring out of the water. I took them inside and dried them off. Then I went back to find out what else had happened. I went to the north side of the house, where the addition joins the original (behind the big oak tree). There was a hollow spot there, where the earth-mover hadn't filled in the corner. I suspected that was the root of the trouble in the basement stairwell. But why had it suddenly gotten so bad? I looked up at the roof. And I saw those bundles of shingles. You remember, the ones Mike had abandoned up there when he ran off to Texas? Well, no one had thought to move them. Why should you?
I suddenly realized why. Because Mike had left those shingles perched at the edge of the roof (see pics near the bottom of page 4), right where the slope changes. He had left them horizontally, across the roof, acting like a big dam to water flowing down the shingles. And that damn dam was directing the water, like an amazing, impromptu gutter, from that section of roof right into that hollow where the new addition met the old. Thus, part of the reason for the water in the new stairwell. I climbed up to the roof and reoriented those packages of shingles to work for me rather than against me, cursing Mike all the way.
But that wasn't the end of the fun. Remember the wind-ripped Tyvek from previous pages? (Go ahead. Go back and look. I'll wait.) That Tyvek didn't seem very important in the winter, when the addition wasn't heated. Nor in spring, when it was, but the weathe was nice Now, though, it was sagging from long neglect (the weather hadn't been nice enough to climb up and fix it -- and we'd had other projects to get to). And that sagging Tyvek was acting as a rain-catch, directing water down the top seams of our new windows and into the new addition along the seams with the walls!
Brian came by about then (to tackle our planned stair and floor project), and we discovered the reason for the trouble with the Tyvek: Mike hadn't secured it properly to the walls! He'd only kinda stapled the corners and edges -- and not done those very well. No wonder the wind had partially ripped it off! Brian and I put fans inside to dry off the seepage (don't want mold in the drywall!), then we tackled the Tyvek, this time securing it properly, and adding some to the west face that Mike had neglected. (You can see in the pix that Mike hadn't Tyveked the upper floor area. He told me it wasn't important, because the insulation wasn't against those walls, but rather, against the living space inside. Fool me -- I believed him at the time. Now I know it was just another job he didn't care to take the time to finish properly.)
In the second two pictures, you can see the roof -- with the shingle bundles as I repositioned them -- as well as the corner where the water was directed. Additionally, you can see the only bit of Tyveking that Mike did that hasn't given us trouble... yet. Hopefully, we can fix that up before it becomes a problem. Assuming the rain will stop long enough to let us.
The final pic above shows the yard in its newly-rutted glory. I built some "roads" with old OSB that Mike had left outside to rot (at least 4 big, good sheets ruined by that), so Brian and I (with Julie's help) could haul dirt from the back yard up to the pit in the corner. Needless to say, we didn't accomplish anything yesterday that we thought we would -- though we did "save" the house. Oddly, the ground in final picture doesn't really look that wet. You'll just have to imagine that all that brown, nice-looking earth is really blood-sucking mud so powerful that it ruined two pairs of my sandals in one day. And when I say ruined, I just don't mean "made very muddy," I mean pulled them apart and broke them.
This wasn't a disaster of the same order as Mike running off with our money without finishing the addition, but Saturday, May 22nd was a very, very bad day.
Hopefully, tomorrow things will get better, and we can get back to what we want to be doing. Last night, though -- in an act of defiance against nature's plans for me -- I, like a modern-day homeowning Job, sanded the basement walls.
You gotta keep on keeping on.
MORE TO COME....
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