I Know What You Did Last Summer... Begins

Around these parts, the summer sun sets pretty late. The longest day of the year has daylight until 11pm (although technically, the sun has set before then. There’s just something about those long evenings and all that sunshine that brings out the productive in me. It also helps that the warm weather is what makes all the fun projects possible. If you can’t pour cement and dry paint, the options are really limited. I really enjoy home improvement projects. The reason is simple: the finished product. Stepping back and admiring the “after” after living for so long with the “before” is immensely satisfying… especially knowing “I did that.” I can usually remember the big projects, but I’ll do a slew of little unexpected projects, too. So, this is my journal of all of them—and inevitably why some of them did not get done.
5/19/11  That’s the finished date for a project that started in the middle of this spring’s flood. We had water in the basement from the high water table—at least that is where I point the finger. The last time we had that problem was the last time we had that kind of flood, which was 2 years ago. I thought we had that problem fixed with the sump pump and some tiling I put in then. I was wrong. So, this year I installed some strategic cement to raise specific areas down there. That doesn’t prevent the problem, but if it happens again, the water will pool in specific places that drain into the sump-pump holes where it will get eliminated before damaging anything important. So, the biggest part of all of that is that I moved the water heater to a more logical location and it is now a few inches higher than any water barring a much bigger catastrophe. Some day (translation: many thousands of dollars required) we’ll need to lift the house and build a new foundation. We’ll solve more and bigger problems in that process.