Archive for October 23rd, 2004

The Rain Comes Down… and In

Saturday, October 23rd, 2004

A pretty decent storm rolled in last night and has been pelting us with a fair amount of rain. M. and I went over to the house this morning, and right off the bat noticed an unusual pattern of wetness on the front steps. Sure enough, water is dripping from the middle of the beadboard ceiling on the front porch (which is thankfully outside and not inside). Porch roof leaking: check.

Off to a good start! I decided to give the house a once over to see if we were in for any more surprises. First off, I found a small (3″x8″) puddle at the foot of the basement stairs–some seepage had come in through the basement wall and then through the secondary concrete block wall (the front half of the basement is encased in concrete block–I have no idea why). The second leak was a small bit of dampness to the left of the toilet in the basement bathroom that I just ripped out.

The real problem here is that this side of the house (the North side) is where the driveway is, and the driveway has settled in a manner that causes it to grade towards the house instead of away from it. M. and I fiddled with the downspouts and did the best we could to point the water as far from the house as possible.

Ah well.

We managed to get the last 3 sets of shelves assembled for the southeast basement storage room, so now we’ve got a nice storage room with 5 sets of shelves with 6 shelves each. I’m so looking forward to having real storage space.

After wrapping up our assemblage, we noted with some satisfaction that, even though it hadn’t stopped raining, the water spots in the basement haven’t gotten any worse, so until we can rip out the driveway, reseal the foundation, and replace the driveway, we’ve just got to make sure that we keep the downspouts away from the house.