After cleaning up the lunch mess and re-applying sunblock, I headed out to check on Tom and Pop in the hole. Tom was out on boards creaming the concrete, and I thought I was going to go weed the garden. About halfway through the floor, Tom needed a break, so I carefully stepped to the end of the board and went to town. The weeds would wait. This floor was looking so good. We won't decide for a while how we would finish it - maybe just seal it. We could paint it, tile it, put down wood flooring, or carpet it. Until we know it is really cold, we won't carpet it, and the job was looking so smooth that we could just leave it be.
Just as we finished and started shuffling the boards back onto their piles, a big drop fell on my arm. Then another. Tom and I were thinking the same thing, and it wasn't good. There was literally nothing we could do to protect the floor and our work from what was about to happen, and happen it did. We made it out of the hole and in the house before the worst of it broke.
Big heavy drops and lots of them. Hail and wind and hail and rain. We put it behind us as we waited it out inside. Pop called to ask if he could bring the pump from the firehall to drain the basement, but we said we'd wait till the rain let up to check on it. He also made a joke about needing to put carpet with a thick pad down on the floor, and I just cringed to think the floor would be so cratered.
I actually fled the noise and ran into Springer to pick up some groceries for Father's Day dinner, and by the time I got back, the storm had moved on, and Tom & Pop had set up the pump. They estimated pulling out 750 gallons of water from the basement, about 1 inch of standing water. The garden sure was happy for the water. We also had to drain the "moat" around the outside walls that was slowly leaking into the corner of the cinder block wall where we couldn't seal around the buried footer. The craziest part about it all is that the surface of dirt was really only penetrated about half an inch at most. Crazy!
You can see the reflection of the windows in the water.
The moat full of water cannot be backfilled with dirt until the floor joists are up - should be within a week or two.
Swirling down the drain - there are drain pipes in the mechanical room and the cellar stairs - we just dropped the pump into them and let the pump work its magic.
Draining the moat - the water is 2.5 feet deep!
The south wall was already backfilled, but not compacted. The crack in the mud is along the wall of the hole, and it's amazing to see what water can do!
So the last pour of the day was the rain - and boy, we couldn't complain about it because we needed it so much. By the grace of God, all is well, and all manner of things is well. The floor looks beautiful. It has a pebbled finish and looks really nice. No carpet plans just yet!
Pop was a great help, and who should call while we were working but Mom. She told Pop to make sure we came home with him for dinner. We ate well and were grateful for a delicious meal, including an amazing banana walnut cake. It sure beat cold cereal, which is probably all we had the energy to make. So thoughtful! So blessed and lucky are we!
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