Our are had what I would call almost monsoonal rains yesterday. I watched from the window in dismay as the gutters on both the front and the back of the house overflowed and were washing out maple seeds. I was aware the gutters would need to be cleaned in the fall. I didn’t think about cleaning them recently, especially since the roofers had cleaned them out when they did the roof in March.
Not sure a pictures shows how much water was on the floor
First surprise
The basement floor of this house is half finished out and half garage. Late in the morning there was a lull in the storms so I thought I’d better get the dogs outside for a pit stop. I opened the door to garage and was greeted by a swimming pool effect — there was water all over the floor. I ran around to make sure it wasn’t damaging anything. The water appeared to be coming in the front of the wall and while there were boxes stored there I had put them on 2 x 4’s to be safe. I needed to pick up one box and everything else looked okay.
I started to get upset about the flood of water and then thought “Hey, it’s the garage. It could be worse and be in the house. The house!”
Second surprise
I ran back inside and found I had squishy carpet. along the wall bordering the garage. Oh joy.
I quickly moved furniture so I could pull back the carpet and padding. I pulled them up and flopped them over a folding chair so they could dry.
Third surprise
I stepped onto what I expected to be concrete and found water standing on (and in) foam.
Carpet and padding are already pulled and I’m working on scraping foam off the concrete
Apparently there had been foam backed carpet glued to the floor at one point of the house’s life and someone had pulled the carpet out leaving about 1/4″ of sopping wet foam firmly glued to the floor. How was I ever going to get things dried out with the foam there? It would have to come off.
I got a putty knife and started scraping. My test knife was the narrow 1 1/2″ size and while it worked, it was going to take forever. I went out and got a couple wider putty knives. Try as I might, the wider knives flexed and didn’t get under the foam and truly scrape it clean. I was going to have to do the entire area with the narrow
The little putty knife is the only one that would get down and get the foam cleanly off the concrete 🙁
knife. Groan.
Several hours later I had the wet foam removed from the floor a couple of feet into bone dry areas. I removed the carpet strips that were completely wet and soft. I threw out a section of the padding because I had no idea how I’d get the water out of it and I figured it wouldn’t be too expensive to get some at Lowe’s. The floor inside was mopped up. I used a broom to push most of the water out of the garage and mopped up what remained. I sprayed bleach water along the baseboards in an effort to deter mold. Fans were set up and things appeared to be drying nicely.
Another heavy storm started around 7:00 PM. Again I watched the gutters overflow. I ran downstairs and there was more water than there had been before. I had to pull the carpet back further and scrape more soggy foam off the floor. The garage was a swimming pool again.
Goody — I get to do the same clean up twice in one day.
Concerns
I don’t know if the flooding was caused by the sheer volume of water or the plugged up gutters dumping an enormous amount of water right along the house. When I moved here in January we pretty much had 3 solid months of rain with no flooding in the basement.
As luck would have it the guys showed up to finish the rails on the stairs to the deck in back the next morning. They offered to clean the gutters for me. I got up on a ladder and saw there were little maple trees growing in the gutters — there were a lot of maple seeds mattered into stinky masses. Yuck.
I will be vigilant about gutter cleaning and keep my fingers crossed that the flooding doesn’t happen again. At least I won’t have to scrape the foam again.
