Flood!

 So, as mentioned in a previous post, from time to time, when it rains, the basement of our house floods a bit. Today when I went down to do laundry, I realized that the entire basement was seriously flooded and was under about 2-3" of water!

 My first plan was to use the shop vac to suck it all up, but after a couple of buckets full of water, I realized the shop vac was no match for this flood. We had been talking about getting a sump pump for the basement and now seemed as good a time as any to get one. D went to the store and came back with a submersible pump and a hose.

First we directed the hose into the sink, but the pump worked a bit too well, and the water came rushing through the hose so fast that that the sink couldn't really handle it.

This is when D decided to drill a hole through the side of the house, much to my dismay. We ran the hose out to the ditch beside our house, and pumped the water into there. Der then started sweeping the water our of the laundry room.


Flood from LDH on Vimeo.



Most of the water was gone in about 10 minutes. The basement was still soaked, but at least it wasn't splashable any more.

This house was clearly built to flood, since everything in the basement is about 6" off the ground. You can see the hot water heater in the pic above perched on a 6 in tall block. The furnace, chimney, and oil tank are all also about 6" off the ground.

Once we had gotten all the major water out of the house, it started to seep back in. I was surprised since it hadn't been raining for a few hours, but I guess the ground was still really damp. We decided to leave it for an hour, and then I went back down with the shop vac to clean up the new water. It wasn't very effective, so now we are waiting until later in the evening to hopefully do one last vacuum of all the remaining water. Then we will start a fire in the wood stove to attempt to dry it out a bit. We still haven't bought a dehumidifier. We should probably get on that.