This past weekend we received about 3″ of snow. Not much really. Now combine that with rain from last night’s thunderstorm, (yeah…I said thunderstorm…in February, in Southern Ontario ) poorly sloped backyard, frozen ground and warm temperatures and you get water in the basement. The scariest part is that the water was actually coming in at the top of the concrete basement wall. The massive puddle in my back yard covered my brick patio and pooled against the exterior wall and then proceeded to come into the house.

After vacuuming up all the water in the basement, I borrowed a 1/2 HP pump from my wife’s employer and started moving the water from the depression in the yard outside my back door to the drainage ditch conveniently located at the back of my property. There was a good 6″ of water when I started and it took about 30 minutes to get rid of it. Now, I’m simply keeping up with the continuing melt until the freeze tonight. Apparently, we are to get an additional 6″ of snow in the next 24 hours, so I’ll have something to look forward to when the next thaw comes.

This is the second time water has visited my basement from thaw/rain combinations. Strangely, the water came in from a different location the previous time. It’s with mixed emotions that I watch the water flow in this time. Knowing all the problems makes fixing them a one step solution rather than a long drawn out process where you tear up previous work to make further modifications. I truly wish I had seen this problem when I moved here in September, so that I could have made a temporary fix until the spring project fixes it properly.

You never truly appreciate the thought that goes into landscape design and drainage until the drainage part is missing from the design.

Here you can see the level of the water about one hour after the last pumping. Notice how nicely the land slopes up from the house. (click on pics for larger size):

The same area from the other side. There was about an inch of water on the patio:

I don’t know why I don’t just pour the birdseed onto the ground instead of in the feeders:

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