Point Sources

So this weekend I had this great post planned that talked all about Brian and I heading to Raystown to meet up with Jerry, Bunny, and the whole Pittsburgh contingent for some mountain biking and some boating. It was a lot of fun, even though I was unable to keep pace with any of the people I rode with.  Instead, I was presented with a much better post that I will commence now.

After my trip to Raystown on Saturday, I planned to sleep in, drink my coffee, and then do some work around the house on Sunday.  I got a casual start on things that included mowing the grass (for the second time in less than a week), trimming some tree branches, and prepping my porch for an overdue paint job. I also planned to take in one of the last minor league baseball games of the season which meant that I would miss out on a grill session with the neighborhood crew.  As luck would have it, there was a nice solid rainstorm that rolled through the SC allowing me to bag the baseball game and head over to Cathy's for some grilling and football.  Since I was going to be an afterthought for the grilling, I decided I would take a bottle of wine (to go with my PBR and High Life).

As I went into the wine cellar (read: basement) to pick out a nice bottle, I noticed some water at the bottom of the steps.  When I looked in the other rooms around the basement I noticed more water on the floor.  This got me thinking that a pipe had broken and was leaking.  This was unfortunately not the case.  With a little more investigation, I discovered that water was leaking in through one of my basement windows.  Even more important, upon further inspection, I noticed a crack in my foundation below the window that was also allowing water to intrude in my basement.  

While I prepped the vacuum and began to extract the liquid that had accumulated in every room of my cellar, I thought about what might have cause the crack in my foundation.  It came down to two possible options.  One was the earthquake that recently occurred here in the northeast but that seemed unlikely  What I determined to be the more plausible option was the repetitive drilling of massive holes through my house to make way for the new heating and cooling system that has been installed.  Either way, I started to reevaluate my "to-do" list for the house and the foundation repair has managed to make it to the top of the list.  

Fortunately, the crack in the foundation was only part of what occupied my thoughts while cleaning up the basement.  The other thing that consumed me was why, after several years and plenty of significantly more torrential storms, had water filled this window well and overflowed into my basement.  Regardless, I wasn't going solve this issue overnight, and with the water vacuumed up, I decided to grab that bottle of wine and make my way around the corner to grill.  

As I walked around the side of my house I noticed a few things.  One thing I noticed was all the sticks and other debris from the rainstorm that littered my freshly mowed yard.  The other thing I noticed was the downspout that I had moved in order to mow.  The downspout that I moved right next to my basement window and forgot to move back after mowing my yard.  There's nothing like the feeling you get when you realize that the hour and a half you just wasted cleaning up water in your basement was because you decided to directly pipe all the storm water from your roof right into your basement.