My dearly departed father grew up listening to Bill Cosby albums. It was the basis of his lifelong passion for comedy. When I grew up, I discovered his comedy. I only knew him for Jello commercials and The Cosby Show.
In the thirteen years I’ve lived in this home, I have dealt with all sorts of water issues. The first one being from the water line coming into my house. The second being my almost yearly sewage backups. I would occasionally get small amounts of water in my basement. It was enough to clean up, but not enough to cause serious concern.
I’m concerned now.
We received a lot of rain this weekend. Over 1.5 inches in the last 24 hours alone. Many roads were flooded. I’ve seen flooding like this in the area, but never as wide spread before.
Water was literally coming through my fireplace, exiting and draining into my basement. Thankfully the slab is leveled to force water to flow out of my garage. But I’ve never seen it act like this before. Something must have changed with the concrete blocks that form my basement walls, or something has broken on my chimney allowing the water to flow.
The key difference is the amount of dirt and silt that flowed in with the water. I repeat, I have never seen this happen before. I’ve also never seen water flow out of my garage when the door is opened. Never.
So, I did what I always do. Swept the water out as best as I could. Got my dehumidifier going, but it was of no help. I put towels up to help mitigate the flow. I also covered my chimney with 6mil plastic, but that did not change the flow. The issue has to be below grade.
A guy I moderate a group with offered some assistance. It was nice to finally meet him in real life. He purchased a pump for me to borrow, which pumped a majority of the water out. The water quit coming out of my fireplace soon afterwards. He looked at my property and gave me some ideas of what can be done to mitigate this happening in the future.
Tomorrow my day will consist of contacting every professional in the area that I can to get estimates on fixing this. I will also be contacting the Chimney/Fireplace company a classmate operates with her husband. They said they could get me an appointment for Tuesday. This is going to be costly.
And the lord said, “How long can you tread water?“