Wet Basement

God is good. We had a tiring weekend, and we missed corporate worship on Sunday, but we're so very thankful for our loving family. I told Heidi that I don't know what we'd do without our family. We are humbled by how much help we received.

Weekend timeline:

Saturday:
5:45pm - Left for supper at Jeff & Janel Wiegand's. Basement is dry when we leave.
9:55pm - Come home from Wiegand's. Basement is no longer dry. Water has come up through the floor drains.
10:15pm - My dad, mom, and father-in-law are on their way over to help figure out a way to pump the water out. Obviously we can't expect it to go down the floor drain.
11:30pm - We begin to rig up a way to keep the sump-pump cool while just the intake is submerged in water. They're made to be totally submerged to keep them cool while they run. If we don't find some way to keep it wet, the pump will quickly burn up. My cousin-in-law, Josh Pfaffmann, is here at this point too, and between all of us we come up with this system.We bring a hose into the basement and secure it to a bucket to contain the spray. The sump-pump is sitting in the floor drain. The whole set up works like a charm and about 1:45am we call it a night. At this point water was pushing up through my basement floor, but it was flowing into the floor drains and getting pumped out. Time for some sleep.























2:15am - get to sleep
6:45am - wake up to check on the basement. The towels we put down over some of the floor cracks are completely saturated and water running into the floor drains, but the system we rigged up is working.
7:30am - After talking to dad and my father-in-law, I decide to just stay home all day and keep an eye on the sump-pump. The biggest worry was that, if the sump should burn up, we would have a situation where we have a garden hose spraying water into our basement and no floor drains. That would be bad...really bad.
8:00am - I call my brother Benj to see if he has any good ideas.
8:45am - It's decided that Benj and my father-in-law (Max) would come over and help me install a sump-pit in the corner of my basement. Benj goes to his work and rounds up all the necessary tools and supplies and comes over.
11:00am - Work begins in earnest on the pit. Concrete saws, jack hammers, post hole diggers, crowbars, and mud.
12:30pm - We are lucky to have hit the pipe that goes from the floor drains out of the basements. That means we can tie the floor drains directly into the pit, ensuring that they'll drain properly.
5:15pm - We make a run to Menards to get a few supplies to hook up the pump.
6:30pm - My mother-in-law brings supper over.
7:30pm - Back to the pit.
11:00pm - Done. Here's the final installation.

























Here's some miscellaneous pictures of the basement and a video at the bottom.