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Saturday, July 27, 2013

This summer has been the wettest summer that we've seen since moving up here 7 years ago.  Usually by now, the grass is gasping and the gardens are hard and cracked.  This year, it's so wet, we have tons of mushrooms growing in the grass and Chris can't keep up with the mowing!  I have not had to water my meager gardens this year very much.  Even so, I have learned a valuable lesson.  Well 2 actually.  1) we do have weeping tile around our house.  The house inspector had told us we didn't. 2) don't water the gardens for 12 hours at one time as said weeping tile will not be able to keep up and the water will seep into the basement!
Oops! 
Last year, we had new carpet laid in the basement and when we were ripping out the old stuff we came across 2 wooden covers in the floor.  We had no idea what was under there, (I was hoping for treasure), and decided that we'd just cover it up as there had been no problems.  Why go looking for some right?  Well fast forward to last week and this is what my basement looked like:
 I was the one that stepped onto the wet carpet and my heart sunk.  My new carpet!  Chris was out, so I started moving what I could out of the room to get ready to rip up the carpet.  We had to open the wooden covers and found this:

We looked at each other, WTF?  So I called the city and a nice city worker came over within 20 minutes or so.  These are apparently called clean outs, one is for weeping tile and the other for sewer.  Huh!  The water was coming from the front one (weeping tile) and after some experiments, we came to the conclusion that I need to water for less time.  Good information.  It's been so wet, that the ground is already saturated and then I added too much water on top of that, making the water rise in the hole and into our basement.  Needless to say, I have been more conservative when watering!


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