The Housegleaners: A DIY Freestyle Fixerupper Remodel Blog Focused On Salvage, Reuse, and Upcycling

Is this necessary or even effective? Does pumping away 9,000 gallons of stormwater per hour make a difference, or is it instantly replaced via a hydrologic mechanism we don't understand? Are we bailing a boat with a hole in it? It's really hard to tell. We're just starting to get to learn the dynamics of this property. Sarah tested the soil and it drains OK--not great, but not terrible. And in normal times its absorption rate keeps up with the rain. But after a few days of persistent and increasing precip, the ground gets saturated, then add 4 more inches in 48 hours and a shallow pond manifests in our backyard. It's kind of pretty! Better to have too much pure fresh water than not enough. Even after the rain ceases, surface water from the surrounding hills will continue to trickle in, so part of the impetus to use the pump is to get ahead of this latency effect. But does it help? I ran it from 8am-5pm while it rained steadily all day. At times the standing water level ...

What's the difference between a tool and a machine? A tool is reliably compliant whereas a machine is just waiting to turn on you. We're in the middle of some weather, yard prone to flooding, bought trash pump to keep ahead of the rain. Before the deluge, yard already saturated with this week's steady pour. And more is coming. Will Trashy the trash pump help, or will more water instantly well up to replace what gets pumped out? Running a gas engine to alter the natural order feels perverse and I hope we can evolve a more natural, passive drainage solution. But this is damage control mode to keep water away from the house, so I sold my soul to The Machines. And it didn't stop there! Laundry crisis imminent, hooking up washer and dryer was a priority. I knew the electrical outlets worked, but was the drainpipe still connected? Would the leaky old faucet valves fail? Laundry vent combust? Will the Whirlpools we got free off craigslist even work? Listen for yourself: Actual...

  I've been going full tilt since October and I think it finally caught up with me. The cats must have felt my fatigue because they let me sleep in till 10:30, which is remarkable because they usually demand breakfast by 7:30. Even after I woke up they just stayed snuggled between my legs as we listened to the rain. The rain. It rains a lot here in the Pacific Northwet [sic] and this house has needlessly suffered for it. While flooding is a thing here , it's uncommon and not the main problem. It's the steady drip drip drip of rain over the years that has done a lot of damage--damage that could have been easily avoided. Sarah's off visiting her parents and I felt my motivation flag. Plus, like I said, I'm bone tired. So I took it kind of light today, which in the end was for the best because small preventive measures pay big dividends.  I installed more downspout extensions. Most of the downspouts already had them, but some didn't. So I bought a couple yesterday ...

When we bought this house, the seller's disclosure was a laugh--every box but one was checked "Don't know." The only one checked "Yes" pertained to flooding, which the seller noted in detail was a thing that happened in heavy rain. The day I introduced myself to our next door neighbor Dan, the first thing he said was, "You know it floods." Then he added helpfully, "And the roof leaks." Last week, when I took down the kitchen ceiling, I found that yes, yes indeed, there is a roof leak. And today, after days of heavy rains and snow melt, I came back to the house and found an impressive amount of water lapping at the foundation of the garage. Tempting to call it a lake, but it's only a few inches deep, and really it's more of a river, stretching all the way to the back of the lot in a graceful curve around the higher ground of the woodshop. We know the previous owners tried to address this. There's a cut filled with rock that st...

I already partly started tearing up the kitchen floor, the oldest part of this 1960 house. Beneath delaminated linoleum and a waterdamaged layer of 3/4" plywood, there were 3/4" shiplap boards for a subfloor, rotted through in spots (I found out when I stepped through a few), consequence of water damage from when frozen pipes burst two owners ago. But at least the floor in the kitchen is roughly level. In the living room, the floor dives down at the front wall. Telltale saggy ceiling suggests the foundation is subsiding. I'm surprised the large aluminum windows haven't cracked yet. I had a sneaking suspicion there was a problem with drainage under the front deck because in today's rain I heard water gurgling in the downspout but none was coming out the 4" PVC pipe sticking out from under the front edge of the deck, where it should have been trickling runoff onto the lawn but wasn't. The downspout disappeared into a hole in the deck. The only way to assess...