I would love to see some of your guys' car projects, as that stuff is greek to me.
Here is a few outdoor things I did last year and actually took pictures of.
There was a raised flowerbed around our tree by the driveway that was sitting there with no bricks. The person that lived there before us took them all when they moved out. So I dug everything up around the bed, placed in gravel and leveling sand and built a nice wall around it. I don't have many Work in progress shots:
And finished!
We have 2 basement egress windows, that you can open to potentially escape a fire. Well the previous owners placed these tiny plastic egress walls in there, and you couldn't open the windows all the way to get out... nice. Also he put
concrete at the bottom of the windowwell so when it rained, the water drained from the ground into this window well and it would fill up with water. To top that off, the ground all around the window wells actually angled back towards the house. With nowhere else to go, it would come in our windows and leak down the wall into the basement. Fail. Mold Fail. Although it was funny one time to come downstairs and see an aquarium out the window. There were a quite a few late night water bailout sessions. So I set about fixing the window wells, to allow proper escape and drainage.
I don't have a good before picture, but this will show just how tiny those window wells actually were. The window opened outward and would just smack into the wall.
So after a little bit amount of digging I started running into... Concrete!! This genius had poured concrete at various intervals around the window wells to "seal" them in. You can't see them in this pic, but I have a later pic of them. I had to use a pickaxe and a sledge to break up these massive chunks and haul them out of the hole.
I finally get down to the bottom of the windowwell. Hauling the concrete chunks out at this level was pretty tough.
But I finally cleared them out, and the plastic walls. I dug even further, because the guy had placed the concrete bottom of the well almost at the level of the bottom of the window. Not smart.
So to make sure water would flow properly I dug out a big pit, and then at the bottom I used a post hole digger to dig another 4 or more feet down to the draintile thats at the very bottom of the foundation with most houses. Modern homes may have a perforated pipe down there that goes into a sump pump or whatever, but I was pretty sure we just had the gravel.
I put in a capped piece of pvc pipe that had small holes all down the sides so that water would flow as best as possible down to the draintile. I also put in some weedbarrier for funsies and then poured in about 12 + cubic feet of drainage gravel. This would allow water to move very easily down and away from my windows.
After the gravel was in, I started laying in retaining wall brick and leveling it off. I backfilled with gravel behind the brick for further drainage.
Materials/Chaos:
Finished with the brickwork: I placed a small 6 inch step in the brick to help people step out of it.
I then hauled some of the dirt away, and used the rest of it to grade the surrounding dirt, so water would flow naturally away from the house.
Then I went ahead and did it all over again for the other window well! This one had to be smaller because we have a hose that comes out right by the window and the electrical/gas pipes that run out to our outbuilding are buried here too. Also you can see one of the concrete chunks from that window well in the picture, as well. The concrete had dried against on of the electrical conduits, so that was fun to get off.
So after that was all done, I put down weedbarrier (which does nothing, haha) and then a bunch of river rock.
I've had no leaks since then, and even in the craziest of storms there has been no water buildup. The brick has stayed level through the winter, and everything is still groovy.
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Home Improvement (Read 62121 times)
