No water in the house this year, Thank God! In the past years, the same time dad was going to mission trips before I bought the house from him it flooded the house 3 times. Each day was on Sunday. My great-uncle came down from Ohio and wanted his share of the family farm when his mother passed away, he was an arse. Well, he needed access to his part of the land and we gave it to him, no big deal. Well, to paint a picture, he was very frugal with money. He came up with come concrete culverts that were 18 inch ones. He decided that they were big enough to put in to get across the branch between my house and his land. Well they weren't. This is a 10 foot wide branch that all water from the ball park and about 4 streets north of me comes into to get to the creek. Well, it was weird getting the rain we did in June, but it was a turd floater kinda rain. The culverts weren't big enough to pass all the water and it came over the crossing, 6 inches deep heading towards my house. It hit the house and was trying to go around both sides. My house is off the road a little and sits at the bottom of a small hill, the water off the roof is enough to deal with. Water flooded in through the weep holes and ruined the carpet, no fun. Let alone getting out there at 5 am to try to do all I could to stop it. I was using our Ditch Witch trencher and digging up the yard making new paths for the water, pushing water with the back fill blade, anything I could, it helped a lot, but not enough. After hauling out all the old carpet and drying everything and $2,300 later, we had new carpet. The next year, almost to the day, here came the turd floater rain again. This time I went out and did the same before it got to bad and also set up the new mud pump I bought. That was almost enough to keep it from coming in. When I decided it wasn't enough, I went in and pulled up the carpet all along the front of the house and got all the towels I had and lined the front of the house on the inside. All I had to do this time was have the carpet stretched, not bad. I did the same thing the following year. After those adventures, I got the notion to tear out his crossing and fix it right. We bought 3 36 inch by 20 foot metal culverts, put those in and had a cement truck come out and incase them in 2 loads of concrete, fixed the problem. That was a pretty penny :x another $2,300. All my uncle did was say thanks, no reimbursement, nothing. My dad got remarried and bought the land the crossing went with and built a new house on the hill overlooking the creek, high and dry. This past rain there were no problems with flooding around the house, good deal. I guess the moral of this story is, don't be cheap when you do a project, do it right and spend the $$$ and never have to fix it.........Mikey
