One Victory, One Defeat

Regular readers will recall my recent post asking for help with a basement lighting fixture. Shannon's brother Johnny gave us a ton of information and suggestions, but in the end, we relied on Jake's Dad, John, and went with the quick and easy fix. Since the light was (luckily!) in the "on" position, I bought and screwed in another pull-string fixture right into the socket. Voila! A new light for separating darks from lights in the landry room!
A nice, easy fix, woo hoo!

And then, the agony of defeat: the basement window off the driveway continues to plague me. Today I bought an off-the-shelf window well cover. Unfortunately, our window well is unique (like everything at 83 Durant) and the cover doesn't completely cover the well.



And of course, the window well cover would only solve the problem of water falling from above; it still doesn't solve the problem of the water leaking in from the driveway. Sigh. So it's back to the previous temporary solution. This involves a liner of plastic sheeting attatched to the window and concrete with duct tape, then filled part way with spray foam, and then surrounded with bricks. On top of this mess I've put a piece of plastic that the previous owners left. Unfortunately, during the snow this past weekend, Carter stood on top of the plastic, leaving it in its current state:




It's not ideal, but it does seem to be keeping some of the water out, which is better than than leaving it completely open to a waterfall.

Thanks to all our helpful readers for their expertise and advice!

Basement Window: Back to the Drawing Board

When the guy at the hardware store laughs at you, it's not really a good sign that you're on the right track to solving your home problem.

Faithful readers will recall our leaky basement window beside the driveway. I made a temporary fix by lining the window well with heavy duty plastic, which I weighted down at the edges with wet towels. This seems to have kept water outside the basement, but collected a rather large pool of water in the well itself.

My plan: continue with the plastic lining method, but fill the liner with something so that it wouldn't fill with water. My thought was that that super-expanding foam stuff would be ideal; it would make a form that exactly fits with the well, and as long as I put down the plastic liner, it's not permanent. And if it didn't work, I was out a can of spray foam. So, guess, what? Looks like I'm out a can of spray foam. You'll see my process here: first the lining of the well:


And here's the foam:



OK, So I have to let it cure for an hour, but there is no way this stuff is gonna fill the well. I'll update with more photos, but I'm pretty sure this won't work. That said, dear readers, I welcome your suggestions. We could use your help! What can we do for a quick, simple fix for this?

[Incidentally, the long-term fix for this is to build up the sides of this well with bricks so that it's higher than the driveway, then cover the whole well with a plastic thing. This will keep both falling rain and driveway drainage from running into the well. But the masonry is going to have to wait until summer. So we're looking for something temporary and quick to get us through the spring rain/thaw.]

Stained Glass Glory

Today we covered the window in the downstairs bathroom with this film that makes it look like stained glass. Some of you may remember seeing this kind of stained glass in earlier pictures of our house. Unfortunately, the previous owners took it all down when they moved. But we liked the look of it for the bathroom, so we did that here.