Sep
16
Water, water everywhere…
ByOK, I told all of you I would own it if I screwed up! Actually, this might be a regular part of the site… No seriously, I’ve made a number of mistakes and I’ll tell you about one today. It happens to fit right in with where we left off on the BOL updates.
I have been bringing you all up to speed with how the BOL started and has developed over the last couple of years. We spent a number of months looking at homes over a radius of hundreds of miles. We kicked tires, only figuratively though, because if they still had tires on them they wouldn’t have fit my profile. Crawled under and climbed up on quite a few homes before we made our selection.
Hard to see but the low spot is at this end, deeper than it apprears?
Last time we talked I explained how I had installed the skirting around the outside. This being the magical way of keeping the pipes from freezing and the nasties at bay… This brings us to the next chapter in the series… Winter 2008!
We had found our home and made the arrangements for the move. We were fortunate that the home already had gutters installed! Not a huge deal but a handy upgrade as they don’t come from the factory with them. I don’t like the all natural, just let the water run off the roof and splash mud on the side of your house style of doing things. So I was happy they were there and I didn’t have to make arrangements to have this done as well prior to winter.
When the movers were prepping the house to be moved to its new location they removed the down spouts and put them inside for me to reinstall at my leisure. Well, that’s all fine and dandy but all to often my leisure doesn’t correspond to when it would be the most appropriate for the work to have been completed. When we were able to get into the house to begin our projects, I took the down spouts outside where they sat staring at me for quite some time. Each trip we made to the property seemed to always find me working on whatever HAD to be done next. “Don’t have time to stop and do the little things”… You know how it goes! I choose to believe I’m not the only one that this happens to…
So summer came and went! I got A LOT of work done last summer, I’m kind of proud of myself… Before long the weather turned and we start into the wet season, remember I told you before about the rainy times. Rainy, right before it gets real cold and we are frozen solid for 3-4 months… One visit we’re complaining about the heat and then its WET. Guess what still hadn’t been done, that’s right, the downspouts…
No more ice rinks this year
Well, as usual we arrive late on Friday night, after our lengthy drive to get to our piece of paradise. Its raining real good when we get in and what do I see? Water running down all four corners of my new mobile mansion? I guess that’s what would happen if someone didn’t get the downspouts put back on. It was probably close to midnight and I’ve been up since 6am. To late to deal with this now… So, as a type A personality and prone to being a “Worry Wort”, I don’t sleep well knowing that this is going on right outside. It doesn’t help to know that the siding these homes have on them isn’t of the highest quality either!
No biggie, I just go out and reattach the downspouts in the morning. The job took all of about 20 minutes, including locating the proper screws… In the meantime it had stopped raining and the walls started to dry out. Problem solved… Although I noticed, being that I am a sighted individual, that we had a large pool of water sitting in the low spot next to the house. This was the end of the area our “Dirt Guy” had excavated to provide a level grade for the home to be situated on. Hopefully you can see it in the picture. It was 18 inches or so deep and the full width of the house. I remember thinking to myself no problem it was just because the downspouts weren’t on. Well, in hind site, I can’t understand how a reasonably intelligent man wouldn’t think that all that water needs somewhere to go, DUH!
Corner Example
We spend the weekend enjoying ourselves and returned home thinking all was well, “bring on the next problem”. Its usually this kind of cockiness that comes before a fall.
We spent a couple weekends in Seattle before getting back over to the property. In the mean time the weather had progressed from wet to frozen. We arrived again late in the evening as usual and all appears to be just as it should be – great!
Morning comes and I head outside, coffee in hand to survey my vast holdings. All “my land” as far as the eye could see. I’m just being dramatic, we have quite a few trees and so “as far as the eye could see” isn’t far at all! It sounds good though… Well, low and behold I have enough ice for my own ice rink. Obviously the rain had continued and with no where to go, except down my downspouts and into the low spot, what should I have expected?
Alright, frozen water 8-10 inches deep that would have to sit there until Spring… What could I do now? The part I still hadn’t clued into was that the water was under the house as well? Also, under the house is the concrete blocking that holds the house up and most importantly LEVEL…
I have no choice but to wait it out until spring to see if this is going to be a problem or not. It is expected that there will be some minor settling but not enough to be a problem… We’ll just have to wait and see… We had a long cold winter with an above average amount of snowfall.
Spring came and finally the water thawed out and after a few months the area dried out. We had made it through with no obvious damage! A close call, if the blocking under the frame had experienced to much frost heave I would have had to have had the house re-leveled. We’re experiencing some extra squeeks in the kitchen floor but not anything worth spending money to have fixed.
All corners tie together and out away from the house.
This entire problem could have been avoided with a very small amount of forethought on my part. 20 minutes to attach some downspouts and maybe 20 bucks for some PVC pipe to get them running the water out away from the house? I didn’t price what the re leveling was going to cost but I have heard that its not cheap, not something I would have welcomed after less than a year.
I have installed a proper drainage system for the downspouts now and we have had a couple of rains so far this year. Everything seems to be under control, at least for now. The water drains out away from the house a good distance so I doubt I’ll have this issue come up again. I did neglect to work a water catchment system into the piping when I put it all together? I’ll have to get back to that in the future, don’t want to waste a good resource don’t ya know!
Prepper
