Wednesday, July 20, 2016

It Never Rains But It Pours

No, it isn't raining here again. Thank you Lord.

We knew after the flooded basement that the cost of repairs was going to be high. We have the money so that is not a problem.

The problem is in how the previous owner and his builder took short cuts. Nothing like shoddy workmanship to get Harvey riled up!!

We removed 2' of drywall in the library/office/bedroom and Harvey noticed something strange. The wood underneath seemed to be rotting in the closet. When he managed to pull the wood off the wall he found an area where the wall cement did not come all the way down to the floor. Hmmm, after researching on the internet he figured he could fix that small space.

The next day we removed the wall board in the man cave and Harvey noticed something very strange. The plywood under the wall board was rotting....

All of a sudden I heard some slamming downstairs (I was up doing a bit of decluttering, nothing like a flooded basement to get a person cleaning things out).

"Jackie, come down here right now." Harvey called. I could tell from his voice he was getting frustrated and very angry.

I went down and Harvey told me to watch. He stuck his pry bar in the bottom portion near the floor where some rotting was occurring. Well that pry bar slid right in like a knife through butter, and what came out was dirt. Seems like there are many places where the floors and walls don't meet or at least don't seal.

Since we have never had water in the portion of basement that flooded before, the rotting must have started when the previous owner had the house.

Now all the bottom plywood has had the nails removed (there were nails pounded in every 4") and tomorrow we remove it, clean the dirt and mud away. Both of us fear that there will be major construction to get the floors and walls to meet and seal. We even wonder if any of the concrete places in town will be able to fix this mess.

The one good thing is we found the problem before it got worse or we tried to sell the place.

I will post pictures of what we find tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Everybody have a wonderful evening.

God bless.

3 comments:

  1. Oh Jackie, I'm so sorry you've made this devastating discovery, but like you say, at least you have found it. I hope you can make good without too much difficulty.

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  2. It seems this is quite common...when we were doing the shower and tore out the old fiberglass one, we found there was no insulation behind it and it was against an outside wall..we've built a house ourselves one time...that way we knew what we had....I hope this all turns out well...wonder why the inspector didn't catch this shortcut.
    Mama Bear

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