Quite a few weeks ago, Joseph went into his room to get something out of his dresser and his socks got soaked, which led us into some bigger issues with lots of water in their room. We attempted to clean things up, dry things out, and make a mess in our living room while we tried to figure out what our next step would be. Check out this post to see that day.
After talking to lots of people about what could be wrong and what the best way is to fix it, we became slightly overwhelmed and decided to contact a relative of mine, who owns Houtman Construction to guide is in a general direction, not to mention we have outside work that we want them to take care of.
So after George left our house yesterday, we knew we had our work cut out for us, except we thought it would be a bit simpler than how it turned out. We started by tearing out the baseboards and finding black mold. Not sure if it's actual black mold or just dirty mold or what, but either way, what we found wasn't good. We thought we could get away with cutting into the corner and seeing what the blocks look like.
The board that is along the entire bottom of the wall was rotten and literally crumbling in our hands.
Mike measured about 3 feet high and that's where he began cutting until he could cut the drywall out and pull out the styrofoam insulation.
The next portion showed the wooden boards rotten on the bottoms from soaking up the water over periods of time.
Lots of stinky, black crap covered the base of the floor. The blocks are damp. And all the boards are rotten on the back side.
Mike knew he had to keep going until he found the beginning of good wood, or the end of the rotten wood, so he kept cutting away more wall.
In the meantime, the carpet from their room hangs over our deck in hopes of saving it. George advised us not to throw out the carpet that many times letting it be out in the fresh air can get rid of the smell. Since we just laid that carpet down last summer, we thought it was worth a try. After the repairs are done in the room and we bring that carpet in, if it still stinks, we'll replace it at that point.
We also found hairline cracks running under the window in the grout. We're not sure if this is the partial cause of why there was so much water coming in or if there are other reasons. The landscaping outside settled in towards the window, so we'll have to tackle that next. The darker gray areas are where the blocks are damp and towards the left is where it finally dries out.
At this point, we had to remove the entire south wall and half of the west wall. And now we just wait for George to stop by and figure out if we can fix this from the inside or if we need to excavate on the outside. George had mentioned we could "paint" this stuff on from the inside which would lock out the moisture, so we're hoping that's what we can do, but until he sees this much, we wait.
We're really hoping this can be fixed from the inside, as we don't want to dig down outside.
1 comment:
Val, we had a lot of water problems at our house in Grand Forks. The ground water level was so hi it became a constant battle trying to keep things dry. After countless hours of research we found that the best way of eliminating the water problem was to have a company come in and fix it. They dug a hole in the basement big enough for a 50 gal drum. They then drilled laterally under the floor using the hole as the center of the wheel and the spokes were the pipe under the floor. This allowed all the water to drain to the drum and then a sump pump pushed it outside. This dried up our basement enough to where the cracks even closed up. Never had a water problem again..If you have any questions give me a call any time... Steve & Doreen
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