In my last post, I talked about how we added enough dirt to the west side of the house, that with heavy downpours, water backed its way into our basement. I’m just glad that this happened before we left for Hong Kong, so I could try and fix it.

Instead of plastic basement window wells, the west side of the house has concrete “walls” around the window to hold both dirt and water back from the windows. Unfortunately, we added enough dirt and mulch that rain ran back down into the well, around the old wooden window frame, and onto the basement floor. (A later project will be to change those old, rotting, peeling windows!) Since we lined the house with Castle Rock landscape stones, dirt had to be added behind them, but that proved to make the elevation of the ground higher than those concrete walls.

Of course, with my luck, we noticed this on Thursday afternoon, the day we got our new driveway gravel. We were to leave for NYC on Saturday morning and I still had 1,000 things to do. So, early Friday, I got up and started out at my favorite store, The Home Depot. I picked up some pavers and mortar, and got to work. I added 4 inches of height to the concrete wells by setting the pavers in on their sides and this, by now being higher than the surrounding dirt, will hopefully keep the water out. On the plus side, I think it makes the wells look better too and am happy how they turned out.
The next rain will make me a liar or a hero . . . we’ll see.

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