Never Forget there's no basement at the Alamo

Erragal pulled out the mooring poles,

forth went Ninurta and made the dikes overflow.

The land shattered like a pot.

All day long the South Wind blew,

blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water,

overwhelming the people like an attack.

No one could see his fellow,

they could not recognize each other in the torrent.

The gods were frightened by the Flood,

and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu.

The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer wall.

Ishtar shrieked like a woman in childbirth.

Six days and seven nights

came the wind and flood, the storm flattening the land.

When the seventh day arrived, the storm was pounding,

the flood was a war--struggling with itself like a woman

writhing in labor.

Tablet XI - The Story of the Flood

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Kovacs Translation)

*** 

Did I just open a post from a smart alec renovation blog with a selection from the Epic of Gilgamesh? Absolutely. Also the website I sourced it from had a header written in Comic Sans.            

Chef's kiss.

Here's the short version: In mid July we had just laid the sub-floor in The Room and started to put up drywall. The entire east coast then suffered through two weeks of "once a century" storms which, thanks to climate change, now come every few months. Multiple major cities experienced massive flooding, people died in their cars, families were displaced, and worst of all we had a little bit of water flood The Room. 

A combination of water off the roof, the ground water pooling up, water flowing in from uphill neighbors, and generally poor grading meant that we had substantial standing water up against the side of The Room, which crept up over the masonry footers, under the subfloor, and then over the subfloor.  

  

  

It sucked. The negative feelings and stress of standing in torrential rain trying to bail out the side of a house while arguing with one's partner and trying to keep the dogs inside and safe is not a reality that merits too much space here. It sucked. 

Brie eventually convinced me to come inside, that the damage was done and we would address it post-storm. The yadda yadda of it all is that the magic DriCore subfloor with plastic on bottom and wood on top, designed to be especially resilient against moisture, was totally ruined and warped the following day. Turns out that regular products with moisture resistance are for regular houses with regular problems. We're special. We of course couldn't remove it until insurance came out to assess everything, which of course was just a formality b/c ground water incursion is not covered, but we still went through the pantomime of it all. 

Brie spent the better part of a work day trying to get any company that seemed even remotely related to the problem we faced on the phone so they could come out and give us advice or an estimate or anything. She got two foundation specialists and a couple of water and leak related companies to agree to come out in addition to the professionals sent by the insurance company to go out of their way to deny us any money.

It took about 2 weeks for all parties to come out and make notes on their clipboards, during which it kept raining, once even so bad that water got in again. I had taken to spending free time during the day in the side yard digging ditches in an attempt to draw water away from the house. It made me feel less powerless if nothing else. 

The bad: Eventually insurance confirmed that they wouldn't offer anything, which we already knew, but we had been forced to leave the water-logged subfloor in The Room just in case they did let the claim go through. Now we had to haul out the sodden mess, leaving us back again with a tar covered cement floor.

The other bad: Every company Brie had contacted sent someone out and they 1) looked at our situation 2) listened to us painstakingly lay out exactly what the problem was and what was causing it and 3) then were silent for an extreme length of time and said that they weren't really sure what the solution would be, "but I've got a guy back at the office with a ton of experience and let me take this back  to him and you'll hear from me in a day or two" and 4) then never called again.

The good: A guy named Jesse from Drainage and Erosion solutions, one of the few companies that had answered the phone, showed up, walked us out to the yard and before we could say much quickly described exactly the problem we had, the causes, and outlined a number of solutions with an expectation of success and cost for each of them. A lifesaver.

They started by waterproofing all around the foundation with an adhesive barrier. They also trenched out two feet from the house, creating a water well full of stone and a water permeable pipe. This pipe ties into a drain that's under the down spout (something we had ourselves moved to the downhill side of the house) and connects to a hard pipe under the ground that empties into a water dispersement zone just uphill of the swale. They also regraded the ground around The Room to angle any water away from the walls and into the water well. Also, for no charge, they removed the old, ugly flower bed from in front of the room and mulched it.

We did some more research and decided that we had to treat The Room like a wet zone (though the threat of largescale water incursion has been eliminated). Brie found this all plastic subfloor that is totally waterproof and still allows air flow. You'll see it in photos below.

MEANWHILE: The insurance and yard stuff was all happening outside, but inside we still had all these other projects on the move and appointments scheduled.

Windows: Just days after the storm we had the appointment to have all of The Room windows installed. In preparation, the day before installation we had to open up the voids where the architectural windows would live.  

Look how good they looked! We then put up plastic overnight as a stop gap so no moisture or birds could get in. The next day the window team arrived, installed the double hung windows and the large picture window on the sides of the room, but when it came time to install the architectural windows, informed us that the measurements were incorrect and that they would need to reorder these specific windows. After all the waiting, we had these two fucking holes in our house covered in plastic for 6 weeks. 

So we pressed on and decided to tackle the ceiling.

The ceiling: The big issue here was that we needed to insulate the ceiling with a particularly high R value product. This was around the time that the country went from extreme rain to 30+ days of 100 degree heat. At least the room had two giant holes in it to let the heat in.

Due to the nature of the insulation and drywalling that followed, Walt and Ramona were often relegated to the breezeway.

We cut and inserted the insulation into the ceiling bays and then covered it with a plastic sheeting, stapled into the joists. This task took two people the whole way so there aren't any pictures, just before and after. 

You can also clearly see the new double hung windows and the drywall we put up at the same time.

Those cabinets came from a great craigslist deal. We rented a home depot van and headed north of DC with the dogs to pick up these Ikea numbers for 1/3 of the price from someone moving to Philly. They failed to tell us they lived on the 3rd floor and I massively fucked up my ankle slipping down some stairs. ANYWAY.

Windows 2.0

We eventually got our final windows installed and they look great and the room is whisper quiet and water proof and (even without the mini-split AC unit) is so clearly insulated and temp controlled that it was all worth it.

So now we wait a month or so to afford the mini-split and then, once installed, we wait another couple of months until we can afford to have Cesar and his team drywall the ceiling. Once that's set, we install the flooring. Everything after that is cosmetic.

Oh and Rocket ran away and visited us again

Oh and Walt chased a deer into the woods and got lost and then I found him and ran into a creepy old man, but that's a story for next time.

S.