Saturday, October 30, 2010
Why humble house?
During our first wander round the new house, we found an old photo frame with a small sheet of cotton in it with some cross stitching. I figured it was a piece of history probably from the previous owner, so we shouldn't get rid of it. We've been trying to find a name for the house, and this chose it for us. 'Humble House' is rather ironic, considering it's a four bedroom house, at nearly 2000 square feet it's far from humble.
Flooded basement
It's been an exciting and challenging few days. We woke up on Thursday morning to find water pouring into the small basement below the new house following a couple of nights of very heavy rain fall. In places the water must have been a couple of inches deep. I can't say I'm totally surprised it had flooded, I'm just surprised that it was so loud - like we had a stream running through the basement. According to our neighbour that's not entirely uncommon in older houses like ours - he said he regularly had a stream running through his basement.
At some point soon, we will have to dig a sump pit and install a sump pump to help prevent this kind of incident from happening in future. Part of the problem is that there are almost no gutters on the entire property. This is less of a problem at the front of the house - it points down hill. At the back of the property however, the building is U shaped, trapping water that runs off the roofs and off the side of the hill, and there is no where for it to go except the basement. There's little we can do about the hill run off at this stage, but I'm going to spend the next couple of days installing guttering to try and guide the roof run off away from the foundations.
In the mean time, we've got a submersible pump to remove the vast majority of the water, along with a wet/dry vacuum to remove the remaining water. We might also need to invest in a dehumidifier to finish the job.
Annoyingly this whole episode disturbed our efforts to remove the remainder of the old kitchen chimney. We'll have to get back to that once the basement issues are resolved.
At some point soon, we will have to dig a sump pit and install a sump pump to help prevent this kind of incident from happening in future. Part of the problem is that there are almost no gutters on the entire property. This is less of a problem at the front of the house - it points down hill. At the back of the property however, the building is U shaped, trapping water that runs off the roofs and off the side of the hill, and there is no where for it to go except the basement. There's little we can do about the hill run off at this stage, but I'm going to spend the next couple of days installing guttering to try and guide the roof run off away from the foundations.
In the mean time, we've got a submersible pump to remove the vast majority of the water, along with a wet/dry vacuum to remove the remaining water. We might also need to invest in a dehumidifier to finish the job.
Annoyingly this whole episode disturbed our efforts to remove the remainder of the old kitchen chimney. We'll have to get back to that once the basement issues are resolved.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
Well - what a change
So it's been rather a long time since I posted on here. Over a year in fact. But then so many things have changed - and we're now moving to Canada. Where we are buying a house that will need as much (if not more) work than this house. And so it begins again. I will continue to post here with the changes to the new house in Nova Scotia. Until that time (which won't be long I hasten to add) TTFN!
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