Drainage again: dry well

Still haven't found the time to post pictures of the ditch project, but we've got it most of the way out to the street and - key - getting the water away from the foundation and basement. Quite successfully! Only one problem; one of the neighbors (one of the good ones who fixes houses instead of being the problem) came by and noted that the city doesn't actually allow you to route water onto the street.

Well.

This pipe effort was already due to the fact that the city doesn't allow you to use existing drainpipe (that drains into the sewers). Which is entirely understandable, as the city's sewer system is roughly the same age as the house itself, and a combined sewer, and during heavy rains, combined sewers are not a good thing. And they overflow into the Whitewater River anyway, and frankly, there's just too much E. coli there nowadays.

We can't just drain the water into the yard, because there simply isn't enough yard. So it's time, boys and girls, to explore the concept of the dry well. And you know, a small one with a plastic barrel is really not too hard. And as the ground still hasn't frozen, well, next week I'm going to put in a dry well down towards the street. There will still be an overflow into the street, but it will only be an issue in really heavy rain, and that's not a problem; the dry well will still buffer the flow.

More later.

Drainage again

I was shocked to realized that I had taken no pictures of the marathon ditch-digging session I engaged in during last week's steady rain. Everybody laughed - they laughed - but nobody could withstand the withering force of my logic: if it's already raining when you dig your drainage ditches, the water will show you its level without any work at all on your part.

So this drainage ditch is on the north side of the big house, where most of my downspouts are (by design). It drains to the northeast corner of the property onto the street, over a wall that I'll have to protect with a trough of some kind. And it's not deep enough; it's probably around 8" deep, but this page recommends digging your trench 12" to 14" deep for 4" drainage lines.

I've also violated the recommendation of that page by including one right angle - but logistically there's just no way to avoid it. I'm going to put in a cleanout there just to be safe.

Anyway, given my recent success in getting all the wet dirt out of the basement, it was immensely satisfying to know just how much water would not be seeping in through the walls. (Not that seepage is a major problem - but seriously, if the downspouts discharge against the foundation, you're just asking for trouble.)

I'll slap in a picture later. ... I've said that before, haven't I?

Drainage

Hello, Gentle Reader! We had record rainfall last Monday, and some water made it into the basement, and so once again my thoughts turn to drainage.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the lakes on the south side of the house, and since installation of the gutters last summer, those lakes are gone. The only problem being that they all go through downspouts on the north side of the house, and those downspouts - while they certainly do a better job than no gutters at all on the south - require proper drainage.

Which I knew.

But the drought last year meant that everything downstairs got bone-dry, and things were doing rather well - until roughly 1.5 Great Lakes fell on us in two hours last week. A quarter-inch of water along the north wall of the basement and a pervasive musty smell throughout are hard to ignore.

So that's one of my top tasks for the coming weeks. AskTheBuilder has a good rundown of what I'm going to do. I'll update this post with a sketch later.

Southeast side drainage complete

So back on July 25 I posted about the drainage ditch I dug on the south side of the east end of the basement; sometime in August or September, I dug the ditch out better and buried some 4-inch corrugated PVC pipe in it along with many bags of pea gravel. For some reason I can't find pictures, so I don't have an exact date (I suppose my Menard's receipts would tell me, if I'd kept up that database, but I didn't, so they stand mute).

At any rate, Thursday I finished said ditch, after rain threatened (thereby causing my wife to threaten). The fear was that the rain would come and stay until the entire pile of dirt froze in place for the winter, which would suck.

I'd been putting it off because the ditch would have to terminate at the retaining wall on the sidewalk, and the logical next step would be to punch through that wall with a clay pipe - but nobody sells clay tile pipe any more. But Thursday was the day. Above, you see my crowbar inserted into the aforementioned wall. Amazingly, I was able to lever a couple of stones out of the bottom of the wall.

Here's the front of the wall, showing the hole at the bottom. It's about two inches high and six wide. Well, once I got things to this point, I realized that this was already a large enough opening for a drain, so I tamped the dirt down and put a large flat limestone rock on the bottom to prevent erosion out of the hole, then I thought: dammit, Jim, I'm a bricklayer now.

So I went and mixed up some mortar, and built a little brick structure to hold the pipe in place; the light was starting to fail a little, and the rain had started, so this picture is blurry, and the last in the series out at the ditch; after this was built and I'd slopped mortar all over it, and next to the floor of my drainage outlet, I dumped in ten pounds of pea gravel and buried the whole thing.

Well, but then I had some mortar left over, so I used it up on some experimental tuck pointing on the carriage house, and mortaring up the seam between the wall and the entry door.

Here's a picture taken the following morning - see if you can tell which joints are tuck pointed. This little bit of work represents maybe half an hour. I'm getting much better at it (it took me most of the day to do the bricks under the window, remember?) but it's still time-consuming work.

Worth it, though. I'm really starting to love masonry.

Drainage revisited

Remember back in June, when I posted about the window wells leaking in the basement in the big house? Well, today we had some serious rain, and I put on a poncho and investigated; really, to understand your drainage, you need to see things while it's raining.

Here's the window well on the south side of the east end of the basement, the worst leak. The rain is falling from the (gutterless) roof down about 25 feet to the ground. The eaves are very wide, but still, a big puddle has built up here and - since the yard is badly graded and humps up from the house in this area, the water has only one place to go: into the window well, which has obviously suffered from this problem for so long that erosion is visible on the inside wall.

On the north side of the east end, we have the porch, and this inexplicable well-like ventilation opening. It's not a window, but it's ten feet north of what used to be one - and as you see, the porch roof simply drains into it, and thence, into the basement. Here, for now, I can just get a window well cover. It'll look stupid on the north side of a porch, but until I get gutters up, what choice do I have?

Back on the south side, though, I can do something right now: grabbing my trusty shovel, I start digging, pouring rain and all. Like drainage inspection, drainage ditchdigging is also best done while the rain is still falling - the water will show you exactly how well your ditch is sloped. Once you've got a good ditch laid out, you can go back during dry weather, dig deeper, put in a pipe and gravel, and cover it back up.

(Yes, I've done this before. It's amazing how often one sees bad drainage situations. With mold allergies in the family, though, one is inspired to take the bull by the horns and act.)

Presto: no more puddle. Easy!

Returning from my ditchdigging, here's what I found on the south side of the west end of the house (the more recent part of the house, sans basement). Now I know why the back rooms smell musty after a rain. Definitely a clear and pressing need for gutters. Here, unlike the 25-feet-up main part of the house, I will probably install my own gutters. For the tall part, I'm calling somebody who doesn't mind working with long ladders.

I should note: the house had gutters - box gutters. Unfortunately, it had fifty years of minimal "maintenance" by people who didn't know how box gutters are supposed to work, with the result that structurally, they're still there - but the new roofing is actually constructed over the gutters, because from the top, it was impossible to see them as gutters. They're topped with tin and tar, presumably because they were rotting.

Also, some are still rotting. But, just as junk tossed into the ocean becomes a habitat for marine life, so does junk tossed onto a house become a habitat. All part of that circle of life thing.

I informed the house's last remaining tenant that I would be evicting him as soon as I could get to it.

Never fear, though! The house does have about thirty feet of working gutter, above the sunrooms. Unfortunately, this is the downspout.

Sigh. So on drainage: Michael 1, The House about 20.

Window wells

Here's the window well on the south side of the east end of the basement. As you can see, it has drainage. Unfortunately, that drainage is into the basement, which experts consider suboptimal, even somewhat gauche. There are two reasons for this drainage situation -- there are no gutters on the south side of the main roof, but there is also no external drainage on the window well, which is about eight inches to a foot deep (I haven't measured, and there are leaves in it, so it's hard to say more precisely than that). All I can figure is that the right way to do this, besides putting gutters on the roof of course, is to dig a drain out to the street, and put a real drain in the window well. Repeat for all the window wells, although this is the worst.

Comments welcome.

Incidentally, this window was also the coal chute. I can tell because there are pieces of coal on the floor under it. This also tells me that the last time this basement was swept was during the McKinley administration.

Downspouts, or lack thereof

Whilst prowling around looking at the absence of downspouts, I noticed that there are drains for them. (I should mention that the city has combined storm/sewer drains and that the water in the local river is unsafe for that reason.) But there are no downspouts. My dad says that this is because they've probably been stolen for the metal. I hadn't considered that, but it may be true.

Just thought I'd better post something today, in case anybody was expecting a post. The Truck 'o' Stuff arrived last night, and this diverted me from directly house-related activities, and will tomorrow as well. The plus, of course, is that I now have my own chair again, and I'll have my office set up in the carriage house soon. So even if I don't have things ready to live there, I can at least spend my days there properly and be online while I do it.

Bit by bit.