January rains

The Rain
Here in Seattle things were all going along good. The snow had melted and I was getting back to my regular routine. Then the rains came and I mean the rains. It rained for 3 days and then rained more. My basement started to get full of water. I know in Seattle we don’t have basements, but my house is on a hill and while they were building it I noticed that it was going to have a 7 foot crawl space. I had them put in a floor and I made a man cave under my house. You know one of those cool things you get to hide in. I have old TV's and a computer and it a great place to keep my seventies things in (Donnie will not let me keep them upstairs. She just doesn’t think that it is becoming me.) I like it, but I have lava lamps and an old spool table and some black light stuff and my R2D2.








Most of the things I got at garage sales or found here or there. I like it. I was running out of space so I covered a 8 x 30 end of the crawl space with a floor. It had a drain under it for the water seepage to drain out of.
It seems that the builder that worked on the back property paid no attention to my drain and plugged it somehow. I think they just ran over it. Well now it backs up under the floor and back past the walkway I have. That takes a lot of water.
Well I got a little pump out that I had bought at a garage sale, and it kept the water out or was draining it. Then more rain came and I got a large pump and that was doing fine until Jan 7 2009 and the heavens let loose the rain. All of a sudden it was filling the basement up again and running into my low spot. I went outside to check in the greenhouse to see if I had another pump. None to be found. I went back into the basement and things were raising much faster now, so I rushed off to the hardware store to get some more pumps. I did not want my man cave sitting in 6 inches of water. I got there with 5 minutes to spare before they closed. And guess what? They still had pumps. I think they just got another shipment in because they were unloading a truck. I bought 2 pumps. I got them home and rushed to install them before the water could reach my carpet (good carpet from a garage sale). I made it with about 30 minutes to spare. With the 2 pumps and my little pump the water started dropping. I will have to install the big pump when the water stops coming in because I have to dig a hole for it to fit into. It will be a more permanent solution to the problem. I am going to try and get the builder back to see if they will do anything about them causing the problem, but I think with the housing mess the way it is they don’t care, and I think it will cost more to make them care than it is worth.