How'd we get here?

So Beginning a couple years ago, we started seeing water in the basement.. Not a lot, mind you, like a trickle that ran across the basement floor in the utility room, from the back wall to the middle of the floor where it eventually dried up.  We'd see this every now and again if it rained a lot or if we'd gotten a lot of snow.

So I dug a sump in the basement floor.  This involved a lot of hammering and cussing and eventually a rented jackhammer that I should have rented first, but I got a nice big hole in the floor, and I got a pump in it. 

Patting myself on the back after a messy job, I thought "Yep, fixed that."

Alas, no. 

Fast forward to the spring of 2011.  We got a lot of snow.

No, really, like a lot.  

When it started to melt, we started to get water in the basement.  Never very much, but it would never dry out.  And then the carpet in the office got wet, so that had to come out.  Then I found the sheetrock was wet on one wall, so that had to come out.  Then I found the studs were rotten on the half wall, so that had to come out, and pretty soon we were down to the foundation in the office...

I did a lot of reading online and found that I needed to install gutters, re-grade the outside and install a perimeter drain.  So I bought the stuff to do the perimeter drain.  I called a gutter guy and got an estimate on a gutter.  While I was waiting for the perimeter drain stuff to show up, I went to clean up the old office.  I was kneeling on the floor, nearly done with cleanup, when I reached up to hang on to something to stand up.  What I grabbed was the edge of the sill plate.  When I pulled, a big chunk of it came off in my hand.

This struck me as bad.

So I call my buddy Jim, who's in the trades and has dealt with this kinda thing before.  He figured on somewhere between a half a day and "A three day extravaganza".  Once the initial horror of having the bottom of house rotting off wore off, I thought, "OK, that's not that bad."  Jim offered to come over and help. 

It also turned out that the back sliding door of the house was in bad shape.  Like "made of mulch" bad shape.  Jim figured that'd be an easy job, so we figured we'd kill two birds with one stone, and knock off both of these jobs over a weekend.  Steph and I dutifully schlepped off to Lowe's, bought a new door and brought it home. 

My buddy Pete, who's also in the trades, shows up on Saturday morning to help us with these projects.  He and I start tearing out the back door, which literally falls apart when I try to remove it.  We get the door out and find...  Rot.

Lots of it.

And still more rot.









So we went inside and tore off the sheetrock and insulation beneath the door, and found, yep, you guessed it, more rot.

This means the deck is going to have to come off, and the back wall of the house will need to be rebuilt.  Guess what I'm doing this summer?