The bad weekend weather forecast was looming, so I broke ground on Friday morning to start setting posts. Chris's guy, Winston, was available to assist with much of the bull work. By early Friday evening, we had 18 of the 26 posts set with concrete, dirt and gravel.
Deck posts - front view
Deck posts - front view side
Deck posts - side view
I took a photo of the working deck plans below. This is the latest iteration. I seem to change the layout every week. So this is most likely not the final version.
Working deck plan
Bonnie poly-urethaned the adirondack chairs to be used back by the fire pit. Looking good and ready for some relaxing.
Adirondack chairs
Saturday night comes and brings with it horrible rain and storms. Apparently, it rained over three inches in 4 hours. This is the view outside the front door around 8:00 am. Driveway - gone!
The great flood of 2015!
Missing driveway
Flooded back yard
From the street
This is a photo shot by me standing in over a foot of water, in the middle of my side yard, looking at the Arnold's new cottage. Looks like "water-front" property. This is insane.
Looking south towards Arnold's
Catch basin drain - overloaded mess!
Deck wood submerged or floating
Bon's Pilot needed to get to higher ground
View from Arnold's new deck back at the cottage
The ferry was shut down (AGAIN) for the entire day. Also, the Rockin' the Rock Music Festival was moved from the downtown square to inside the bars/restaurants.
When the world give you lemons, make lemonade. Since there was nothing we could do about the weather or the flood or the ferry, we decided to go downtown to see some of the Rockin' the Rock bands perform. Here is Bon, at the Pump, kickin' it with the tambourine.
Bon Bon
By early Saturday evening, the water started to recede. By Sunday morning it looked like normal again with a few typical puddles. So crazy. I couldn't work on setting any deck posts because the ground water was way to high and the yard was still wet. I had been postponing a boring crawlspace project and decided it was time to hack at it...
Problem:
The crawlspace access is below grade and would allow surface water to enter the doorway whenever we had heavy rain. This was a problem for years and kept the crawlspace from being completely dry. Plus it looked aesthetically awful from the outside. This is one of those nasty jobs that I deferred for a few years...Solution:
After researching online to find something to fix this, I found this modular enclosure system from Menards. This was a major pain to install. Had to hand dig out the old soil mess and then make room for this new system. Then attached to the block wall with tap-cons. Next, I filled inside the enclosure well with nice clean landscape grade pea gravel about six inches deep just below the access door opening. The photo below doesn't do it justice, but I am hopeful this will dry up the crawlspace access problem for good.
Crawlspace access enclosure installed
Next steps:
- Finish setting deck posts and then start on the beams...
