Grading

It's July, 2010.  My newly installed sump hasn't kicked on once.  It's dry as a bone now in my yard as the heat yellows my grass.

I'm still in a holding pattern as far as the basement's concerned.  I know I can't put any work into it since I don't know if our solution has offically worked or not.  I won't know until the next spring when the rains arrive.

I walk around the yard and one thing becomes really clear -- our house was graded horribly.  There are parts where the ground visibly slopes back toward the house, allowing water to run toward the house.  One such area is the living room which lies right above the home theater room where all the flooding occured.  The landscaping is horrible, full of weeds, half-dead perennials, and uprooted plastic edging.  I tell my wife that I think we need to bring in dirt for that area and she gets an excited look in her eye.  By the next day, she has a huge plan for the whole new bed.


The old bed.  The ground slopes back toward the house.



Same bed, lots of ugly plants.

I took a week off in July from work.  Turns out, this would be the hottest week of the year.  I went through gallons of water each afternoon and gallons of beer each night and didn't urinate once.

The first step was cutting out about 150 sq ft of sod followed by digging out all the plants we wanted to save and splitting hostas from around the yard.  All the underground sprinklers had to get dug up and moved to their new positions.  Next, I brought in about 3 yards of dirt to mound against the side of the house to promote the proper grade to move water away from the house.

I extended the bed out about 8 feet and installed a new metal border.

Finally, I picked up a circular paver set from Menards and built it into the center of the new bed.

Finished bed.

North side of new bed.

The final result was a great success.  Now a year since installation, the plants have all doubled in size and are doing great in their new bed of nice black soil.

Where did the water come from, and how do I fix it?

It's ironic that we need water to survive; we recharge each morning with it in the shower, and curse the heavens when there isn't enough to provide for our lawn and plants.  But as any homeowner knows, water can be your biggest enemy in your house.  Just ask the people of New Orleans, or the Mississippi plane, or anyone with a broken pipe or leaky faucet.

The next few months were spent in anguish reassessing how to get water away from my house.

The first thing I did was talk to as many neighbors on my street.  I was actually really happy to find many who had similar stories to mine: during times of heavy, heavy rain, their basements would flood.

Part of it was certainly the soil.  Our subdivision was once a cow pasture, with a swamp at the end of the street.  The ground is all clay, which doesn't soak up and retain water.

But another problem was the sewers.  A neighbor across the street discovered this.  Frustrated that his basement would fill with water during heavy rains, he literally set up a lawn chair in his basement and watched it overnight, trying to understand what was happening.  He soon realized that the problem was from the water table being so incredibly high and saturated that the water would seep up through the floor of the basement.

When the contractors built most of our houses in the late 70's & early 80's, they put weeping tile around the exterior of the houses.  Not really a "tile" in the traditional sense of the word, it's a perforated plastic tube that lies next to the house, allowing water to seep into the tube.  Water will move horizontally toward the path of least resistance.  So, when it rains around your house, the water hits this tile and moves away from your house instead of pooling at the bottom and trying to bust through your concrete walls.  It's a great system that works wonderfully.

The issue in my neighborhood, however, is that when the builders hooked this tile into the main storm sewer lines, they ran it parallel to the 8 foot depth of the storm sewers.

On those rare occasions when the heavens opened up and it rained cats & dogs, the sewers would fill up faster than the water that was seeping though the soil around the houses.  The water would move toward the path of least resistance, which in this case was BACK TOWARDS the houses.  Each house would get so saturated around the base of the poured concrete that water would move up through any tiny crack it could find.  The fancy term for this is "hydrostatic pressure".

This brilliant neighbor called a large plumbing company, and they agreed: the only way to fix the problem would be to dig 8 feet into the earth, find this pipe, and cap it off.

It all made sense all of the sudden.  I knew the cause of the water, now it was time to fix it.

Being a guy who likes to do things myself, I looked around for evidence of the pipe.  I lifted up the grate of the catchbasin in front of the house hoping to find an inlet -- nope.  I pried up the manhole cover and peered down but quickly realized I had no experience in sewage removal and placed it right back where I found it.  Next I went to the township for plans.  All the plans were in the process of getting digitized, but our street had somehow gotten tossed years ago.  That lead me to the county road commission offices, who also couldn't help me.  They only had generalized plans for the whole storm sewer system, nothing as detailed as I needed.

The next day I saw a neighbor at the store and asked what company she'd used.  McDonald Plumbing, she said.  I set up a consultation appointment, and the head of the company arrived with plans of our neighborhood unlike anyone else.  Apparently, he'd somehow gotten a copy years ago from the original developers and was guarding the plans like a hawk.  He stepped off where he thought the pipe would be: directly under my driveway.  Well, I guess this wasn't a job I was gonna do myself.

I hired him on the spot.  A few weeks later, a caravan of large trucks and tractors showed up at my house.  A large backhoe began digging right next to the driveway and was able to access the pipe without having to tear up any concrete.  After about 30 minutes, he found the pipe, capped it off, and ran it straight to the surface, leaving it about a foot underground in case I needed to ever access it again.

Meanwhile, part two of the operation was installing a sump pump to get the water from the foundation out from the house.  After some investigation, it seemed that pervious owners of the house had flooding issues, because we found interior tiling around the edges of the walls.  Based on the cut lines in the concrete floor, we followed this all the way to a drainpipe by the washer/dryer.  They'd hooked this up to flow into the sanitary sewer many years before, a practice that is certainly illegal now.  McDonald installed the new sump in the ground, hooked it into the existing interior tiling, and ran the discharge out the side of my house toward my back yard.

It was done!  No longer would I have to worry about backflow issues.  Little did I know, the work was far from over...

The Great Flood

The night of May 6th, 2010 changed the direction of the basement entirely.  I'd only been asleep for about two hours when my daughter came in and woke me up.

"Daddy," she said.  "I think there's someone in the house.  I hear a loud, scary noise."

At first I thought she was dreaming.  It had been raining like crazy when I went to bed, and I figured she had heard some distant thunder.

I walked her back to bed, and as I did, I heard the noise: BOOM.  Twenty seconds later:  BOOM.

Soaked

I'd never heard anything like that, so I proceeded with caution.  It was a deep, acoustic, bass sound that seemed to shake the walls. It could've been an intruder trying to rip the TV off the wall.  As I crept down the stairs, I could tell that it was coming from the basement.   I went down the basement stairs, flipped on the light, and put one foot on the ground.  Splash.  I looked down at my foot, and water was bubbling around it in the carpet.  The sound came again, this time very loud:  BOOM.  Suddenly it all my sense.  It was my subwoofer shorting out because it was submerged in water.

Speakers submerged in water

The entire north end of the basement was absolutely soaked in water.  We'd had a little bit of water show up the previous spring, but nothing like this.  It was almost an inch deep, stretching from the north wall to the stairway.

Right away I began to unplug everything and move as much as I could away from the wet area.  The game room thankfully was dry, so I started to pile all the couches, speakers, and wet blankets in that room.  An hour later, I tried to go back up and go to sleep.  It was still raining.

The next day I woke up and went to assess the situation.  I pulled out our steam cleaner and tried to suck up the water through the carpet, but I would fill up the gallon capacity in 20 seconds, then have to dump it and start again.  This went on for hours with no sign that I was nearing the end.  It seemed as if the more I sucked, the more water seemed to come up from the ground.  Stranger still, it didn't appear that the walls were wet or the source of the water.



Carpet gone.  Wet pad.

 After a full 8 hours of this, I finally gave up and decided to rip back the carpet.  I didn't want to do it, but the more I thought about it, there was no salvaging the carpet.  It was bound to rot and smell moldy in that basement.  I also needed to discover the source of the water, and that meant clearing the carpet.  So, it got hauled away.

Determining the source of the water

As I examined the floor, there was no obvious source of a leak.  But there were a few very tiny cracks that ran through the concrete, and coincidentally, these areas corresponded with the heaviest amounts of water saturation in the carpet.

It seemed that the water was coming up from these cracks, although I couldn't imagine why, since that would mean that water was under the house.  You'd think it would come in from the walls, wouldn't you?

Water soaked walls & carpet strips

We put in a call to the insurance company who recommended that we get a water removal company out immediately.  By the time we contacted someone, I had already done most of the work sucking up the water and tearing out the carpet.  Nevertheless, they set up massive fans and dehumidifiers to suck the remaining water that might've been left in the walls out.  At this point, the major concern to the future of the basement was not allowing black mold to set in on the walls.  The company would leave these massive machines running all day, but they would short out our electrical box from all the power they were drawing.

On the third day after the flood, it began raining again, HARD.  Once again, water came up at the same spot, though not as heavily this time.  I was able to see pools of water form around the tiny cracks in the floor.  It was reassuring to find the source, but because the second flooding happened days after the first, we had to file a second insurance claim and pay another deductible.  At least insurance ended up writing us a check for the cost of the carpet and drywall.

So the basement was officially on hold.  Just two months after completing the game room, it was now jammed with all the couches and treadmill from the media room.  And a conscious decision was made that there would be no renovation until we knew where the water was coming from and how to fix it.

Stage 1 construction

In March of 2010, I started in on stage one of the construction -- the game room.  I was hosting our annual March Madness party in my basement.  It's my favorite time of year for sports, and a tradition that my core group of friends and I have been honoring for at least 6 years straight.  My family was leaving to visit an in-law, which meant the boys would have the basement to be as loud and obnoxious as we wanted to be.




Before

 Construction began about three weeks prior to the party.  The first step was to mud the walls.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, the walls were some weird sort of textured drywall, as if they were pre-wallpapered.  They snap together in 4' x 8' sections.  I decided to add joint compound to the top half of the walls, sand them smooth, then add the wainscotting below to resemble your typical bar theme.

Applying the joint compound.

In order to get the project done in time, much of the work had to be done with baby in tow.  He loved it.

Almost done mudding.

After a ton of sanding and one helluva mess, I applied the paint.  The color was something I'd picked out for the descending stairway.  Originally I'd planned on a blue, but I really liked this color and thought it looked sharp against the black frames.

Installing the paneling

I ended up choosing the paneling instead of making mitered trim pieces because it was a hell of a lot easier.  I cut 4' x 8' pieces in half, pre-painted them, and glued them to the wall.  Went on quite easy.  I added composite trim to both the top and the bottom of the panels.  Next, I build the drink rail in to the south wall and finished it with quarter round.  One final coat of paint to touch it all up and the project was done just two days before the March Madness party started.

South wall

West wall with surround speakers

Drink Rail

Paneling close up

The Plan

One night I was laying in bed with my wife reading a brewing recipe book.  She was watching Candice Olson's design show.  On the show Candace was renovating a basement, so I instantly refocused my attention.

I was particularly impressed by the way she would draw up sketches of the space, then fill them in with different colors to test out patterns or swatches.  Yes, swatches.

I looked around my side of the dresser and found some graph paper.  I ran downstairs and found some colored pencils.  I started sketching.

First, I started with the game room.  Nearly every bar or restaurant makes use of wainscotting, so I immediately sketched in three styles.  I added a drink rail and barstools for people watching exciting ping pong matches.  Originally I played with some variations of blue, which would look sharp against a black or darkly stained wood.

I sketched a few ideas on bars, but there were a lot of questions about the size & space needed.  More on that later.

Next, I worked on the entertainment center for the media room.  The inspiration came from some sleek consoles I'd seen at IKEA.  A professionally made console could easily run two to three thousand dollars, so I gave myself the challenge of trying to build one myself.  The bottom compartments would house all the wires, DVD's, Rock Band equipment, and other things that tended to get scattered on the floor.  I wanted to build in shelves that could hold vases, wine bottles, pictures, etc.  This entertainment center would span the entire north wall.

Having kids means that you're short on both time and money.  So as I'm envisioning this basement coming together, I'm jave no delusions that it will happen quickly.  I'm under the assumption that this whole project could take anywhere from 1-2 years, based upon where it falls in the whole scheme of things that need to get down to our house.  I needed to break it down into sections.  So here it is, my grand plan:

1. Game Room.  Paint the walls, install wainscotting, drink rail, new trim, and doorways.
2. Build the bar in the game room.
3. Theatre room: build the entertainment center, mount the tv, paint the walls.
4. Final touches: new carpet, new furniture, new lighting.

I got excited for my plan and drew up a little MS Paint diagram.  Here's how the whole thing looks from above.

Blank Canvas

The only picture from our old basement of beer gone wild

In November of 2005, we stumbled upon a house that had been vacant for over a year.  Initially, we were looking for a house in the Forest Hills district closer to my daughter's school, but we were also outgrowing our first house.  Our old basement was so full of baby clothes, baby strollers, baby toys, and baby paraphernalia that there was no longer room to play ping pong on the table I'd bought a few years earlier.  So when we toured through this vacant house that had a huge yard (a potential garden for my wife) and a huge basement with tons of storage, I knew I was hooked.

We moved in during Christmas of 2005, and I snapped a few of these pictures of this blank canvas of a basement.


The north half of the basement.  Because of the square nature of the room, I picked this side to be the Home Theatre/Media Room.



The back end of the Media Room.  The Stairwell divides the space in half.



The South Room.   It's more rectangular in shape, which I thought would accommodate the ping pong table.  Now known as the Game Room/Bar Room.

The walls in this room were a very strange textured drywall that locked in together against 2x4 studs.  It's as if drywall came with a wallpaper finish on one side.  I had no idea what was behind the walls -- was it cement brick, poured concrete, insulation?  The carpet was grey and had multiple stains that I couldn't get out with a steam cleaner.  The drop ceiling was white, and whoever installed it didn't recess the lights in metal brackets for proper support of their weight.  They simply cut holes in the tiles and dropped them in.  Some of the tiles had a visible sag from the weight of the lights pulling them down.  Basically, I was happy that the basement was partially finished, but I knew I had a lot of work to do in the long run.

The house needed some desperate attention to the exterior roof and interior decorating where we'd be spending most of time.  I figured it would be about 3 years before I could really start focusing on the basement.  In the meantime, I set up the TV in one room and the ping pong table & kegerator in the other.

Phillips 50" Plasma with JBL speakers in 5.1 surround

Old couches and a treadmill face the TV

I envisioned this nook as being a potential spot for a future bar.

The Game Room looking into a small closet where I housed the kegerator.

The ambilight feature on my Phillips plasma HDTV taken with a shutter delay

First post!

Ever since I got married and bought a house with a real basement, I've envisioned a "man cave" in the basement, some place I could retreat with friends and hang out.  A lot of the need for this came from nostalgia from the great times we had in the basement of my buddy Angus back in high school.  His basement was far from finished -- it had a ping pong table that we would set on top of an old pool table.  The basement was cold, the floor was often covered in cat pee, and you had to step over dirty laundry to get to it.  But you could show up at almost any time of night and find at least one of your friends down there laughing, playing games, and having the time of their lives.

It's been almost 20 years since we first found our way to that basement.  Our get togethers are limited to once or twice a year, but when we do congregate, we still like to disappear into the basement for a few days to recharge and feel like careless teenagers again.

This basement has become an obsession as of late, if only because my attempts at creating it were spoiled by mother nature.  So I thought it would be interesting to document some of the trials and tribulations and gallons of sweat I've put in to this dream.   Hope you enjoy.