Uncharacteristically heavy rains have been falling here for two straight days and we are flooded!
Our neighbors have a foot of water in their basements,but Mr. JB and I have been sleeping in four hour shifts and bucketing out the water as it pours in through a crack in the foundation of our basement we didn’t know was there! We’ve kept our water level at around half an inch, so we should be okay when it finally stops raining.
Holy hell! I don’t understand how some people just stare at water pouring into their basements and do nothing! WTF?!?
Get a bucket! Get mopping! Yeah, it’s grueling work. It’s YOUR house!
Guess we’re breaking the floor this summer and putting in new concrete. Fun. But for now, we’re bailing like sailors on the Titanic.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
Damn, you need one of those portable water pumps. I got one a couple years ago when we got a non stop barrage of rain for a month and my basement became an indoor pool. Those little pumps work quick too.
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And how. We have a sump pump. But we discovered a problem. Normally whenever the storms happened, the power would go out, ergo no sump pump. So we got one with a battery backup. It failed to activate. So we eventually said fuck it and got a propane generator to run it off whenever stuff gets real.
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Yikes! I hope it stops raining soon.
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Definitely echo the two word solution: sump pump. And possibly generator. Okay, that’s five words…
Good luck.
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So sorry! Mother Nature hasn’t been very nice lately. 😦 You can see pics of the barn clean up over on my blog… we are almost down to picking up nails and shards of glass out of the grass now, and I would much rather do that than bail water!
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I assume your local rental houses are plumb out of electric submersible pumps? Might be worth looking into…
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duct tape.
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Awwww, Jeebus, there’s always sump’tin when you own a home! (Sorry, couldn’t resist that stoopid pun).
I’ve had to deal with wet basements too and they’re so costly to fix but you have to do it, otherwise there’s mould, spiders and ruination of your stuff, not to mention that yucky ‘damp basement’ smell! My sympathies 😦
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Somehow I will blame this on feminism. Just give me time to figure out the angle.
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Get those extender things for your downspouts so you can dump the roof water a few feet further from the edge of the house. And make sure the gutters are not clogged with leaves. Both will reduce the amount of leakage. It is impossible to make a basement watertight. They leak when the water level in the soil rises above the floor of the basement. As was said above, sump pumps help a lot. How often the power goes out depends where you are. We live in a modern neighborhood with underground power lines and we have very few outages, usually connected to construction, not storms. Gas generators do work if you get a good one.
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We have those extender thingys and the first thing my husband checked were the downspouts. They’re all clear.
I think the water level is just above our basement, as you say.
I’m taking out 20 gallons every 15 min or so. Crazy.
Second night of bailing. I’m gonna need some sleep soon. But it’s better than $20 000 worth of water damage!
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If the crack’s in the foundation (wall), there’s not much you can do but try to fill and patch it (and there are some cool products that work a treat for that), unless you want to spend mucho dough. I had to replace a slab (floor) last spring, and 1000sqft cost about $22,000, but the footings were solid and not much extra needed doing. The main problem is that concrete is porous, so it has to be sealed from the outside, not the inside. You can do weeping tile and try to waterproof the basement walls with poly and other tricks, and do shaping/sloping of the terrain, but the estimates I got for that sort of thing started around $45,000 and got worse. One company gave me that as an estimate just for the slab.
Whatever you decide to do, good luck. I don’t wish that sort of problem on anyone, having gone through it myself. Wait, that’s not quite true. There are a few people that could benefit from the experience, and they probably wouldn’t be fans of this blog. 🙂
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Daayamn, that sucks! 😦 So sorry, JB.
Watch out for mold too later, that can be a serious health hazard. My home is on stilts!
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