New York Renovator

I must be one of the most tolerant homeowners on earth, or perhaps the stupidest, lol. You know how you get so used to something that you tend to not notice it after a while?

I went into the kitchen this afternoon, to fill the tea kettle with water for tea. I noticed a new leak spurting out of our 1970s faucet. sigh. It made me look at the sink area with new perspective. This backsplash behind the faucet is absolutely terrible. Disgusting.

Other areas of the countertop are peeling or warped. I don’t know how I can tolerate it. It’s been this way for about a decade, slowly rotting and getting worse every year. I guess I’ve blocked it out of my consciousness — probably for the retaining of my sanity– because the decay just struck me again as very repulsive. And for a fleeting moment, I wondered why I haven’t fixed it yet. What, am I crazy, letting this go on and on for years??

Then I remembered. Oh yeah.

We do want the countertop replaced, but I won’t do it. Know why? Because this crappy slab of 1972 orange laminate sits on top of crappy 1972 plywood cabinets. Almost all of the cabinets have either fallen apart or are warped. Now, why don’t I just get new cabinets, then? Well, the cabinets sit on top of a severely cracked and broken up 1972 tile floor. OK so replace the flooring, the cabinets, and the backsplash. Nope, because behind the cabinets are 1855 plaster walls, with most of their plaster behind the cabinets missing. In winter, when we open a cabinet door or drawer, the wintery outside air blasts into the room. Wild, huh? I won’t even mention the mouse problem we have here, lol…

OK that’s pretty bad, but maybe I could just replace the walls, the flooring, the cabinets, and then get the new countertops!

Um, nope. Because within the walls is 1920s knob and tube wiring, 1940s plumbing that is not properly vented, and there’s no insulation between the studs. Not to mention that the only kitchen window is broken. I’d have to entirely GUT the room before I could get new countertops. Otherwise, I’d be spending $800 on new countertops for nothing– a shaky foundation. I refuse to set a brand-new countertop on top of disgustingly broken, unlevel cabinets that rest on disgustingly broken, unlevel flooring and against disgustingly holey and broken up walls with disgusting and inadequate plumbing and electric.

So that’s why I tolerate it. Most people would have their moving boxes out already; but I do like the house and I’ve put my heart into my gardens. I just need to gut this ol’ house! Ugh!

So, how are my gardens doing this fine, sunny day!

Old houses often have water problems. Mine sure does. Last year, the kids and I worked all summer on building a huge drywell area, to lead rainwater runoff from the roof away from the foundation of the house. You can read more about it here and here and here.

It has helped our water situation, somewhat, although we so still get backup water from the sump well. I think the reason for that is the undergorund water table is very high around here, and there is only so much we can do to deal with that. Nonetheless, I’ve been mulling over more of my options. I cannot really prevent the water from coming up and into my property, but I can divert it. So we are going to build French drains around the perimeter of the house, one side at a time. (we are doing the digging ourselves, with shovels).

Perhaps the best article I’ve read on building a French drain, and understanding water flow, is here at Ask the Builder. I’m not quite sure where to have the drainage area, because there is the chance of exacerbating the water problems if I don’t extend the French drain system far enough away from the house; I’ll just be creating a pond from all that runoff!

So… I’m doing more research and thinking. I may have to tear up a section of the asphalt driveway to do this. The driveway is very old, and was installed much too close to the house anyway (it’s only two feet away from the house walls!) I have some tough decisions to make. But I think this will be our autumn project before school begins for the kids. And we have to go camping sometime soon before then, too!

I wrote about our power outage earlier this week. Power outages are rare for my neighborhood. My block is on the same grid as much of the commercial district, so the power company has extreme measures to keep this grid up and running. However, Monday we had a severe thunderstorm and we lost power for several hours that morning. Power outages give me the willies because we have two sump pumps in our basement that absolutely MUST stay on. If they are off for more than an hour, my basement floods.

Here’s a photo of our predicament Monday, when the water started to rise from the sump well. GULP.

Thank God, the power was restored before the water got too high. We’ve seen water rise up to three feet in that basement. It’s a constant worry, and I’ve seriously considered selling the property because the flooding causes me such anxiety. I just cannot live in a house and on property that floods when we have moderate to heavy rains. We are in the process of (slowly) dealing with the problem, but a large part of the problem has to do with my property is the only greenspace in a large area of asphalt parking lots, and there has been a lot of over-development in the lands up the hill from me. My yard seems to be the depository of all the run-off water, and my lawn can only soak in so much. So we have a high water table and it seeps up through the basement.

Anyway, all is well today. But I’m off to clean the basement floor again before it starts to smell like a pond!

For several years now, my husband and I have discussed various ways to use all our storm runoff/high water table problems here for something positive. The local and state government is starting to clamp down on the water runoff into streams and creeks. Most of our runoff goes right down into Sauquoit Creek, which flows into the Mohawk River and down to the Susquehanna, etc. I am expecting the DEC to clamp down even more, with burdensome regulations.

I would LOVE to prevent all this moving water from going into our streams. But I have no where to put the water! This is a dilemma for many of us in these valley towns and hamlets. It’s not like we can go out and find cheap land for sale. Everything around us is developed, and this development is becoming more so. Unfortunately this exacerbates the stormwater problem!

Some of the better home and garden magazines are chatting about controlling water runoff and drought. “Going natural.” I’ve ALWAYS been in favor of native gardening, because I hate pruning, fertilizing, and babysitting non-native plants that only poop out after one of our winters, anyway. I love native perennials, and it’s all I plant around here.

Well, there’s a website address I found, if you are interested in the same thing. It looks great! It’s run by Kansas City (they experience flooding from runoff to, and a lot of it is due to extreme development). It’s something the landowners can do that is positive. The website is 10,000 Gardens. I think we are going to implement some of their ideas.

There are so many different reasons why a basement might be wet. I’m not going to even pretend I know about them all or can answer them all. The Internet is the best source I’ve found for finding solutions to specific problems. It has helped me immensely.

We have what could be classified as a “wet basement.” There’s a sump well in our basement, with two sump pumps in it, and these pumps run regularly day and night. If they didn’t we would be inundated with water in our basement. We suffered several years of severe flooding, with the worst experience in 2003. Several times that year (summer and winter), we had three feet of water in our basement. We believe the water comes from underground– the water table. The water table problem (which is high in this area) was made worse when our neighbors installed a pipe system under their new parking lot. One end of their pipe was by a pond and the other end faces our property. Essentially, when the pond gets high, the water goes through the underground pipe and fills up our land, underground. Our property is now developing a pond at our side of the property near the neighbor’s pipe. From what I know now, our neighbor’s did this illegally, but we’ve been informed that “there’s nothing we can do now” because water movement problems are hard to prove. Hm.

Anyway, we’ve had to come up with various, creative ideas to divert water and get it away from our house. The sump pumps, up until last summer (2007), had only barely kept up with the water. During heavy rains, we experienced major flooding.

Now, our house is 150 years old. So, the foundation is 150 years old. The basement walls are the old cut stone and limestone mortar. Amazingly, I have never seen water leak through the walls until last autumn. I think the water table is rising and the underground water is shifting. I’ve had to be very attentive to ponds, pools, and stream flow on my property. I am dealing with the water problems on a case-by-case basis right now.

The house also has no gutters. The eaves are shaped in such a way that they cannot hold them. and the 150-year-old wood is so soft that the wood cannot hold screws or nails anyway. So a lot of water comes off the roof. We are in the process of building dry wells in the problematic areas. Just one drywell has alleviated some of the moisture problem we were having. See here for a post on our drywell construction.

Because terrain, precipitation, water tables, foundation structures, and water movement differs from place to place, your own water problem is especial. Here are some good links I have found with useful information.

Lowes.com has a good page on solving water problems (scroll down).
This has some good info with photos.
State Farm’s input on water problems.
Ezine Articles has lots of short posts on a variety of things.
This site has some good info on foundations and how they are constructed.
This Old House has a good article on runoff water.

For us, I have more plans. I intend on building low berms around the perimeter of the property, to prevent runoff water from the street from coming into our yard. More drywells in the corners of the home will help. Eventually, we hope to dig down to the foundation footer (or thereabouts) and install perforated piping and gravel. I also am going to plant some water-thriving plants in our new “pond” in the yard; perhaps I will make it into a dry creekbed kind of thing, with river rocks to aid drainage. All this is in the works.

I recently blogged about our (currently) dry basement. I can’t tell you how elated I am that is has been dry all winter. It is NO FUN to have sump pump pipes freeze during the winter, and to have to thaw pull apart the ump and pipes in freezing cold water. Brrrr.

We have had severe water problems on our property for seven of the ten years we have lived here. Much of it is due to negligent over-development, we think. Storm water problems have been afflicting the people of our township for several years, and it is no coincidence that there has been an enormous burst of uber-development of our suburban and rural areas during these same years.

We have two sump pumps in our basement sump well (some people have three now!), and in the past, these two pumps running simultaneously have not been able to alleviate the two or three feet of water that floods our basement. A sump pump is a motorized pump– a very powerful pump– that sucks up water through an opening and pumps it through a hose, where the water is dispersed. Our sump water flows through two flexible plastic pipes that run across the yard to a catch basin by the side of the street. It is an inconvenient system but we do not have the resources or time to excavate half the front yard to install pipes. The catch basin is insufficient for the amount of water we put in it, anyway. It has overflowed many times and spilled excess water onto the street and into our yard… and right back into our basement.

For minor flooding, sump pumps are sufficient to removing excess water. Many homes have small wells in the basement for this purpose. However, if your water problem is more severe, sump pumps are not going to solve the problem. I’ll be blogging about various things to do when a property has water problems.