Showing posts with label flooding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flooding. Show all posts

The taste of slimy water

Good news for me, the electric box in the laundry room won't need to be moved, and only the cable holes need readjustment. When I planned this out, I completely forgot about the dryer venting. It will go in the wall and through the attic now, but it's a shame because one of my only projects this summer was to install a pretty, flush vent in the stucco-drywalled sun porch window currently hidden by the dryer. But now I can reinstall a window there.

I'm still waiting for the crawl space to dry out enough so it's not sludgy and slippery to work under there on my knees. We thought about pumps and drain pipes but a low-tech solution occurred to me- why not raise the crawl space/swimming pool vent openings? Right now they are at ground level and make an excellent drain for storm water overflow. The crawl space bottom is 2-3 feet lower than the yard level. That might sound pretty stupid, but it seems to be the result of building up the yard with infill to encourage quicker draining. This explains why our 1928 driveway ribbons are 6" below the topsoil. And as this is Florida and we live on infill creek bed, maybe parts of the yard did indeed sink sometime and need refilling.

I can't say how many times we thought about moving during this week-long storm. But, improvements must be made so we're not flipping them onto a buyer as it happened to us. It would be super if those improvements don't include me trying to suck the end of the garden hose to make a crawl space siphon.

Isle Collins, in the strait of Murray No-Hill

While I'm just itching to start the kitchen renovation by knocking out a false wall in the kitchen, I've promised myself not to do it until I have enough money to fix whatever I discover behind it. So that will wait indefinitely while our new (to us) appliances hang in my mom's laundry room. Then I'll build a couple of new cabinets, and am ordering all the doors from Rockler because I don't want to make them.

In the meantime, we got some rain this week. Maybe this is why our house is higher than the ones around us. Everyone else still had some yard left. The water was within a foot of the joists in the crawlspace. When the water got pretty high that night, some people in a dinghy hit the chimney wall on their way to the cars stranded in the picture below.


The microwave circuit breaker kept flipping that night. Reviewing my electric notes today, I saw the cable to that outlet runs under the house instead of through the attic like the rest of the runs. Everything else is fine, though my car has been wedged in a mud rut since Tuesday, as nothing is really dry yet. Most of the yard mulch is still hanging around, too. Mostly, this has taught me that when we build the shed, it needs to be at least 1' off the ground.
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