how to water proof ur basement in 5… wait, 10… no, 15 or so steps
ok, so here’s the situation. we bought this house kinda by accident. maybe i’ll go in depth sometime, but to make a long story short, fully expecting a big fuck you, allowing us to go on and get a new construction townhouse in magnolia, we bid over 35k below asking price on this place. when they came back and said “yes”, without so much as any negotiations, suddenly we were buying a house in ballard and the rest is history.
on the day we moved in, it rained, as my dad says, like a cow pissing on a flat rock. the drain in the driveway was hopelessly clogged and it quickly overflowed and water started pooling in the garage, but the real surprise came when we walked into the basement later that evening and discovered 3 inches of water in one corner around the basement drain. water was visibly seeping from a crack in the wall and as we started tearing away at stuff over the next few months it became obvious that the foundation leaked in several different places.
i guess re-bar wasn’t in high concrete fashion in 1939.
anyways, the lady that we bought from had actually disclosed the leaky basement, but the form we had said it had been sealed and was no longer a problem. obviously it was. basically they had probably painted the interior walls of the basement (less than half of which are exposed) with some kind of sealant. this is a stop gap measure at best. in order to actually permanently seal a foundation, you have to do it from the outside. we chose, or rather dan chose, to use the W.R. meadows mel-*** system, which consists of a water-based primer glue, tar backed thick plastic sheeting, tar impregnated fiber protection course and some other odds and ends that we didnt really need. so, like i said, 5 easy steps, right?
step 1: dig a hole
first time on a backhoe. look at the size of that dirt bucket! to quote the running man, (austrian accent) “well i haven’t been in show business as long as you have killian, but i’m a quick learner and i’m going to give the ppl what I think they want!”
step 2: apply pink stuff
ah, the glue that binds us
step 3: apply green stuff
this shows the right way
step 4: apply black stuff
forgot to take a pic on the house
step 5: apply brown stuff
no not that brown stuff george
sounds simple enough, right? well, when bill was here we did some digging by hand. this weekend i rented the backhoe. on sunday we actually got around to doing trying to put up some of the green mel-roll stuff. we hosed down the exposed walls to get the dirt off. danielle sprayed on the glue and matt and i tried to put up sealant. that stuff is crazy sticky, just like duct tape. if u let it sticky side fold back onto itself, u may as well forget about salvaging that piece. and this stuff aint cheap. neither is the primer, and whatever you dont cover in sealant, you have to reprime the next day, so all that stuff was wasted too. at about 6:30 (way early when the sun goes down after 9:00) we quit working after only getting to stage three.
note to self… never stop working at stage three.
it’s been extraordinarily hot up here lately. one thing that is pretty explicit in the instructions with for this crap is that i shouldnt be used if the temp is above 90 degrees F. the reason is, that the tar based backing on the plastic gets softer as it gets hotter, which reduces it’s shear strength. basically that means it wont stay where you put it. monday morning after d and i had went to work, dan got up and saw light coming in thru a hole in the basement wall where a pipe once came in.
aww crap.
after being exposed to the sun for too long, everything we had put up the day before had fallen off, and like i said, once it gets folded and sticks to itself, it’s pretty much garbage. so now we’re stuck with half the foundation dug out, a crotchety old lady next door that’s getting pissy because we have dirt on her side of the property line and nobody home during the day to work on it except dan. i didnt want to wait for a whole week to fix this and have to deal with mona that entire time, so i took today off to get it finished. in my naivete i honestly believed, i could finish all of it, backfilling with dirt and all, by say 2:00 or so. i needed the time in the afternoon for something else. i even precut all of the green plastic i would need (i thought) last night before hand. so we started out again this morning @ 7:30 with step 2 (step 6) and didnt finish until about 7:00 tonight. but it’s all friggin done!
what pisses me off about it though is that all i’ve wanted to do for the last week is put the new shocks on the FC.
the koni’s came friday, the sway bar and end-links today, along with a new clutch.
they got here too late for the understeer/oversteer event last weekend, but not too late for the boeing renton car show going on tomorrow. a few years ago when noel got his 350ZX he took it to the show. it was him, a guy with a really nice turbo 911 and one with an RSX type S and about 50 or so american muscle cars. of course, they were totally shunned and the next day, there were pics on the ECF website of every car except those three. therefore, we have decided to storm the show with our imports tomorrow.
we’re gonna mount our slicks and put on all of our race decals. the plan was to jack up one corner to show off the suspension mods as well. i was hoping to have enough time to mount the konis, replace the sway bar, install the toe steer eliminators and finally replace the rear brake lines today after working on the house. so much for that…
i’ll have pics tomorrow. or hell, by the time this post goes out, it’ll be today. stay tuned.
