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

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...