By all accounts, Friday morning started off pretty great. No kids were up yet, the house was quite. The dogs were quietly napping beside me and I was enjoying my first cup of coffee in some much needed peace and quiet.
When I hear it…
blub…
Wait, was that a kid awake upstairs? What a weird noise. Maybe it was just my imagination. Maybe I hadn’t had enough coffee yet.
Then again…
blub….
What the what?
That noise just sounds bad. Like bad things are bubbling up from under this crazy house.
I immediately started pushing back furniture and throwing back rugs to get at the access holes in our wood floor. Since our hardwoods were built over a slab, they had installed a sleeper system for the subfloor to sit on and the hardwoods to be nailed into. We had just screwed plywood over the holes made by the foundation company last year.
As I pull up the first piece of plywood, my fears are realized.
Water. (and yes, crappy iphone pics to follow, because for the love, I could not even think about finding the actual camera.)
And not just a little water. A pond bubbling up in my living room from the ground. This flood did not come spilling in from a doorway.
We had a huge rain the night before and no water came rushing in. This was a direct result of the ground being saturated under our house. With the holes cut in the cement slab from foundation work, it was able to find it’s way up around the new cement.
For the love…
Pumping the water out all day does nothing but make me crazy. The minute I get it pumped out, it fills back up. Because it’s ground water. You know the definition of insanity right…why did I keep expecting a different result?! Yet all day long I pumped the water out and would stand there and watch it fill back up.
But you know what the freak-out was? There was an electrical wire to an in floor outlet running along the floor. If I had been thinking straight I would have shut off all power to the house.
But no. Because logic had flown out the window. Plus the fact that it’s summer. In Texas.
So Saturday we spent the day ripping out all of the hardwoods and the sleeper system they were built on. And the bottom 2 feet of drywall.
Fantastic.
Some days I really think a wrecking ball needs to visit this house.
Even the stinky dog is confused.
Oh, and the best part??? We discovered that the plumbers didn’t tie in one of the upstairs bathrooms to the new sewer system. So all this time, that bathroom had been dumping into the abandoned sewer line under the house — going nowhere. Thankfully, it wasn’t a bathroom that gets much use, but still! Ewww!
So that’s a fix for another day.
I swear, I will not let this house break me.
Famous last words.
