All of the rain we've gotten in recent months caused a big problem to surface at home; water drainage! When I first moved in, I noticed problems with my back yard being saturated with water after it rained. After doing some investigation into old tax records, plus noticing some of the junk mail that arrived to "homeowner" or "current resident" (for pool supply places), I concluded that a previous owner used to have a swimming pool in the back yard. (More recently, someone pointed out to me where a natural gas line seems to come up from the back yard to the gas meter, where it's disconnected and capped off. Most likely, this was for the heater for the pool.) My theory, then, was that they just buried the old in-ground pool, perhaps without even breaking up the concrete floor of it first, so water isn't draining into the soil as well as it should be.

None of this was really more than an annoyance though, until a few months ago, After repeated heavy rains, I came downstairs to discover the carpeting was drenched, near the walls, and black mold was starting to grow near the baseboards in a couple places! I tried calling one of the best-known waterproofing firms in town, but they were so busy, they couldn't even come out to give me an estimate for 2 months after I made an appointment. That wasn't acceptable, so I resorted to calling one of the smaller guys advertising on Craigslist in the classified ads. He wound up digging a "drain field" about 18 inches wide, down the length of two walls, along the edge of the basement floor, and ran it out to a sump pump installed in my garage. The walls had to be ripped out, several feet up from the floor, as well.

Next, I had to hire someone to redo some of the water-damaged wood framing and replace the torn-out drywall, and to repaint afterwards. As so often happens though, trouble comes in pairs. In the middle of this whole project, I discovered MORE puddles of water in the garage and laundry area. THIS issue turned out to be a drain pipe in the wall that separated! At least the additional drywall that had to be torn out to get to the plumbing was able to be replaced at the same time as the other work.

I wish I could say I have a happy ending after all this work and thousands of dollars of expense, but as these projects tend to go, I don't! My basement has a fireplace, and while doing the waterproofing work, they were hesitant to rip out the fireplace hearth to dig under it - so they opted to go around it instead. It turns out that was a bad idea, because water is now coming up from under the hearth, even though everything else is staying dry. I'm now struggling to get them to come back out, honor their "no leak guarantee", and do that part over. Of course, this also holds up being able to redo the flooring and make the basement usable space again. (Being a split-level house, that means I'm effectively living in only half a house in the meantime.)

The kicker is, I *still* really don't know if a buried swimming pool is to blame for all of this or not. Since the pool wouldn't be metal, like a buried pipe or utility line, people tell me there's no real way to see if it's there or not without digging up the whole yard. Furthermore, other residents in my cul-de-sac apparently all have similar water problems - so it'd be tough to finger the pool as the culprit, even if it WAS down there. (For all I know, we could dig it up only to discover it was already broken apart into chunks, so not the water issue after all!)

Maybe THIS is why so many people just rent an apartment or condo, huh?

Tags: home repair maintenance