MacGyvering Madness at 83 Durant

Yesterday, in an attempt to stem the tide of water entering through the basement window by the driveway, I put a heavy-duty trash bag into the big open well area that normally lets water seep into the window. [Normally, such a window well should be several feet deep and filled with drainage rock at the bottom; ours is about four inches deep, and solid concrete. No wonder the window leaks. We need more of a submarine porthole.]


My trash bag and towel solution worked beyond my wildest dreams, and seems to have kept a LOT of water out of the basement, which is always a good thing. But it created a rather amazing trough of water outside. You can kinda get the gist of it here:

We figured having a pond of water there wasn't such a good idea, so we went about a bailing out program, helped by our trusty SHOP VAC. We heart our shop vac!

The drainage pipe in the middle of the driveway has frozen up (not surprisingly) so all the melting snow water is just sitting there. We devised a plan to clear out and then defrost the ice plug. Here's shop-vac in action:


After sucking all the water out, we tried adding a couple of kettles of hot water, to no avail. Jake tried using a metal fence post to assault the ice plug, but it was also sadly unsuccessful, unless you want to call breaking off a part of the pipe successful. We then tried using a little electric water heater -- the kind you use to heat up a mug of tea. It too was unsuccessful, although admittedly, we didn't try for too long, as we started to get nervous about all the extension cords and potential fire/electrical hazards we were creating.

We'll hope things warm up enough tomorrow to get some movement. For now, all is well.