faboo mama

Faboomama’s Fountain from Brad Fidler on Vimeo.

My new seesmic friend Brad, recorded my top favorite fountain in all of Los Angeles for me. This is at UCLA. I don’t know if the fountain has a name, but it’s a pretty cool fountain.

Even though I want to set up my pool today, I’m feeling kind of guilty. Go over to LA Metblogs to see my post on Water and California to see just why.

Monday before I pumped the basement.

This is today, after two days of pumping and vacuuming out the basement.  I discovered the drain.  It was under a 6″ stack of wet cardboard and newspapers.

My crawlspace behind (upslope from)  the basement.  I’m assuming there’s no drain tile along  the foundation  The water is running along the entire north side of the house.  This photo is interesting in that with the naked eye (even using a flashlight), the entire crawlspace looks completely dry.  The water only shows up when flash is used.f

So, ya’ll know how dirt broke I am…On Sat. night, the electricity went out in half the house. Breaker was just tripped and couldn’t set right. An electrician came on Monday morning to fix it. Turns out that $5200 I spent back in Feb. ‘07 was even more useless. We found out that more stuff Citywide Electric said they did, didn’t get done. The electrician charged $250. We only had $395 total in 3 bank accounts (no credit cards here). So, we’re pretty fucking broke, is my point.

I called a flood expert and she said it would be $650 minimum up to possibly $1200 to unflood my basement. Click. I chose to go to Newland Hardware where I rented a sump pump for $25 for 4 hours. I got that bad boy home and pumped my basement out. Not completely, but enough. I checked the basement this morning around 5am and it looked fine. I took the pump back around 8am, and went on with my life. 45 min. later, I went downstairs and noticed the water got higher. Ran back to get the pump (an extra $14) and pumped it out. The only problem is that there was still 2″ of water in there. That meant we needed a wet vac. Yet another thing I wanted to buy back when we had money, but didn’t Oh well, I’ll just rent one.

The guy at Home Depot said that to rent a wet vac for a day costs as much as buying one, so I bought one. Who knows if the basement will flood again. I got the wet vac going and we’ve gotten a lot more water out. Went down to the basement to check it and what did I find under the sink?

A FUCKING SUMP PUMP!

The people who owned the house before us had a sump pump and they left it here along with a ton of hoses. We never understood why they had so many hoses. Now we fucking know.

And no, they did not disclose this flooding problem to us at all. This is us, beyond pissed.

Our basement is flooded.

Had the heater on and it sounds like the washing machine. Mr. Fab turned it off and I realized that it’s sound like that since Friday. I had gone down to the basement on Thurs. or Fri. and it wasn’t flooded then. I decided to go see if water got into the ducts and the water is probably about 3 feet high.