The flooding basement

You may remember my posts from last year about my basement. About waking to find almost 3 feet of water lazing about ruining my shit.  Well, a big reason why is that I had put a stack of newspapers over the drain.  Duh. 

We’ve been vigilant, but lacking funds we could only hope not to reproduce last year’s drama.  We know now that the water is coming up through the cracks of the concrete floor, so explain to my why I thought it to be a great idea to put a rug on that same floor during the winter months?  After this morning’s rainfall, I peeked downstairs to see that the cracks were wet, but all was well.  Not too long ago, Adrian asked if the basement was alright. He took a peek to find that it wasn’t.

There was only about 3 inches of water in the deepest parts and thankfully everything had been put up high.  Still, the carpet is wet, as are cords to various small appliances.  I ran to the back to grab a bamboo stick and see what was clogging the drain this time.  One little slip of paper. That’s all. 

So, the water has gone down the drain, the cracks are still swollen and weeping water, but at least we didn’t have to spend 3 days with the sump pump.

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The The flooding basement by Anika Malone, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 6:03 pm and is filed under House. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

  • Did it finally dry?
  • Joe
    Which step do you believe is the most important to the cleanup process? We recently had a flooded basement and it's still a mess.
  • I rented a sump pump. It wasn't until we got the water level down did we realize the previous owners had left behind one. Once we got the water level down to about 4 inches, we used a shop vac to get the rest of it out. Our basement is all concrete, so we don't have to worry about mildew in drywall and all that stuff. I then turned on all our fans and ran them for 3 days. We have 4 of them, so that worked. Otherwise, I would have had to rent a more powerful fan. We did all of this outside of the house via the egress window.

    Good luck on cleaning everything up. Our basement flooded again recently (about 2 inches this time), but this time I didn't have newspapers sitting over the drain hole (go me!). The only problem was that a little piece of plastic was clogging the hole. Once I got that out, we had to use the push broom to get the water to the drain since the floor was now heaved from being swollen with water.
  • what a drag...file under the joys of home ownership. hope it all dries soon.
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