life's a ditch
bleah. so on friday i went over to the house to do some work and found a huge pool of water in the basement. apparently all that rain we got brought more water down to the foundation than usual. further inspection of the side of the house revealed that the neighboring yard is sloped towards ours and there's a depression right around where we're seeing the leakage. i'm not sure that this counts for all of the water, but it's at least one culprit. all said, i ended up sucking up around 20 gallons of water with my shopvac throughout the course of the evening.
the plan had been to dig down about 8 feet to the foundation, drain out the water that has accumulated down there (we already know that there's water inside the bottom few layers of concrete block around the problem area), and fill this back in with a slope away from and towards the rear of the house. however, the weather kind of turned against us today. and we discussed this plan with our neighbor and she's concerned that in doing this we may end up just pushing more water back onto her property. in the interest of being a good neighbor, i'm gonna have someone come out there and look at it with both of us to see if we can find a solution that meets everyone's needs. which of course is going to push the start of the main studio construction back to god knows when.
in other news, we started preparing the lounge/bathroom area for floor leveling so i can at least make some progress there while we figure out what to do about the water leakage. we sealed off the shower drain and got the floor all clean, which gets us most of the way there. we picked up 10 bags of the self-leveling mix as well as a power mixer for my spiffy new heavy-duty drill since the leveling stuff can't be mixed by hand. i'm hoping to pour all the stuff tomorrow night so it'll be ready before the end of the week when people start coming in to do the kitchen installation upstairs.