The great flood of oh-ten

Last night, I got home from work and said to Mike, "I think I'll finally update our blog tonight after dinner." We've started moving ahead on the HVAC, and we've rebuilt our front walkway's stairs. There's lots of progress to show.

I started dinner (burritos with my new favorite veggie - fresh jalapenos) and Mike sat down with our laptop at the kitchen table. In between updating his Facebook page and laughing at Awkward Family Photos, he checked the weather.

"Tornado warning!" he exclaimed.
"Watch?" I asked.
"No, warning," he replied.

(End fiction-style dialogue.)

Basically the storm from hell was headed right for us. So I turned off the stove and we got ready to head for the basement. Ten minutes before it reached us, the National Weather Service let the tornado warning expire, but we were still in for it.

Round 1 of the storm hit hard. Sheets of rain, some hail, constant lightning - it was really something. When it settled down, so I started dinner again. As the taco meat cooked, I decided to check the basement. Sometimes in heavy rains, water seeps up from between the cracks in the cement floor.

Mike must have been unhappy to hear me shouting from the basement: "Oh sh--! We have a huge problem!"

Oh yes. A river runs through it.

The parts of the foundation that are outside of the basement were pouring water into the space behind this door. If you click to zoom in, you can see the water flow - this shot was taken after the main flood:

Interestingly, the water wasn't coming from the doors themselves. It was actually coming through the foundation. You can kind of see the situation in this image:


That also meant that the water was coming from under that door and a river was running through the basement to the drain in the floor. Just then, round 2 of the storm hit.

KDKA, our local news station, says we got 2" of rain in an hour. I believe it.

I guess the pictures don't do it justice, but during round 2, it sounded like someone was filling a bathtub behind the door. When we finally did open the door, it looked like a garden hose was being sprayed through three places in the stone wall.

We set up a channel system with towels and 2x4s to direct the water to the drain and hoped that the drain would keep draining. If it had stopped, we would have lost everything in the basement. The water flow was unbelievable.

Luckily, in the end, this is all we lost (and most of it was due to go to the Salvation Army anyway):


We did much better than the people half a mile west, who had 4-6 feet of water in their basements. We're very lucky.

New project with high priority: sealing the foundation by those doors and rearranging our stuff to be on shelves above the basement flood plain.

Spring Has Sprung

And just like that...winter is finally gone. Well, not completely, but we're mostly there. Two months blew by since my last post, and we've managed to do the following (along with plan the upcoming wedding and attend to general life things).

We got a new front door.


It will soon be painted green to match the lattice on the bottom of our front porch. Here's a shot of the pattern in the glass from the inside:


Mike finished the basement doors. Check the previous post for the "before" pictures.



We installed three of the four glass block windows. Window number four (seen at far left in this image) is going to be tricky. After installing three windows, we've decided to pay someone else to do the last one.


We hung up our flag and porch numbers, on the porch that is 99% completed:


And though you can't see them, we planted rosebushes in front of the lattice. We hope to someday have plants that don't look like dead sticks.



We had our upstairs bathroom rewired, and we installed drywall (XP board) and a fan/light on the ceiling. I'm really excited to have a ceiling again. We may even have walls again soon.






And we finally carried the foosball table from the garage into the attic/office. Next we will plug in the beer fridge that was conveniently left up there by a former tenant.






Stay tuned for bathroom walls and maybe even a toilet! We can all dream, can't we?

Basement door makeover

Basement doors before:



Basement doors during makeover:


Mike is making them out of composite deck material. It's heavy as hell, but it will be more durable in that damp part of our yard.

I'd post the "after" pictures, but shortly after Mike finished building the doors, it started snowing. So stay tuned until our next nice day...three months from now.