Water Damage
I had a rather crude surprise this weekend, one that will cost me a great deal of money. I was having a wonderful Saturday afternoon nap, when Sonja woke me up and told me there was something I had to see. I followed her downstairs, still not noticing what had caused enough alarm to bring me out of my slumber, when she pointed out some tiles that had popped off the floor.
My dozy brain slowly tumbled the information over, and then it came crashing in that I had some sort of a leak, and now had a good deal of water damage. The drip was coming from the winterizing valve that leads to one of the outside taps. Even though I had shut it off and drained out the water, it appears that the cold has loosened the valve enough to generate a very slow drip. One or maybe two drops a minute slow; slow enough that unless you had the lights on, and were very quiet, you would never know.
Well, I needed to stop it, because you could already see mold and mildew growing up though my solid hardwood floor. It was everywhere.
The more we dug around the more water we found. It would appear that the leak had been steadily working from some time last year, and the cool basement stopped any evaporation that the water wanted to do. We pried, scraped, sawed and hammered up a huge deal of the floor. What the picture doesn't do justice is the amount of wicking the drywall did to become mushwall. The smell of rotting wood was overpowering at time, and you could see the progress the mold had made though the cracks in the floor and between the slats of hardwood.
Now, most of the hard work is finished, and the expensive part begins. I had been debating what I was going to do with the basement, debating between spending a truck load of money bringing it up to the city's specifications for a legal up-down duplex, or a photo studio. All I really know is that I can't sit on it anymore, and have to act on it.
