Water Levels Rising, Captain!

Parte Un

While I don't mind water, what my house does with it pisses me off.

I have a couple of big trees over my house; they are forever depositing crap onto my roof that, therefore, ends up in my gutters.

Now, these are new gutters that I had installed after I (yeah, myself with friends) reroofed the house. The guys who installed the gutters and downspouts have an ingenious method for installing the downspouts in such a way that they are SURE to trap every leave, helicopter or dust mote, thereby clogging my gutters. They cut an "X" in the gutter, bend the four flaps created down and out (but not to 90 degrees), then secure the downspout by screwing a 1.5" nail IN so that there are now SIX sharp objects available for trapping debris.

WTF?

It literally takes about 5 leaves for the whole thing to come to a screeching halt. With huge trees over my house, how often do you think that happens? Yes, less than a day.

The gutters I had when I bought this house were rusty--even rusted through on the front (CLUE IN JAY). I had new ones installed, and thought that they were using extra-large downspouts. Imagine my dismay when I'm laying in bed one morning during a gentle rain, hearing the rain slosh over the sides of the gutter and pouring onto the deck. @#$%@#$!

So, fine, I went up and cleaned them out. Oh, and those sharp corners and screws? Of course I cut myself. Once.

So they were full again this weekend. We didn't have time before church, so afterward we came back and I got up on the roof (don't worry, I have a great ladder) and cleaned them out. That was around noon. I then worked at Josh's during the day getting stuff out of his basement so that he can clean and paint. I get home at 5:30 and they're full again! @#$%@#$%@#$! So, in the pouring rain I went up again and cleaned out the few little leaves that were blocking. *Sigh*

My brother Jim, who's an engineer and genius to boot, put pieces of screen over his gutters so that water would flow in and debris would stay on top. I think that would work for leaves, but I'm not sure about the smaller stuff. I'm going to give it a shot. I've heard that Gutter Helmets are useless with trees above the house. I'm also going to go back and do it right (as with so many other things in this house) by removing the downspouts, bending out the "X" pieces at a full 90 degrees, and reattaching the downspouts with a little bolt with the ROUNDED END on the inside. Would that be so freaking difficult?

If anyone else has a great, even easy, suggestion for me that works great, I'll buy you lunch. I'm not kidding.

Parte Deux

After I clean out the gutters and have just finished making the window frame square in the third bedroom (another correction of past sins...), I get a frantic call from Josh: his basement is filling with water and he's pretty upset. He has two basement rooms, one newer than the other. The new, smaller laundry room gets water in it that he needs to shopvac out when the water table is high. Well, last night the big room was filling. Luckily he has his stuff elevated.

When I get to his house I find the basement with inches of water in it. I brought my two water pumps. We worked for several hours, me pumping and bailing water, and him patching as much of the wall as he could with Quickcrete. However, with the water table that high, it's not a winning battle. The back yards in this block are all lower than the fronts and there was a small ocean in them. Josh's neighbor Bill usually pumps out the lake to the street with a huge pump he has, but even Bill's garage had stuff floating in it. An amazing amount of water.

We knocked off at Midnight after I printed several different sets of instructions for installing a sump pump. Josh purchased two today and will jerry rig them for now until he can get them installed correctly. He was so grateful that I dropped everything and came over.

Hey, that's why I'm here.

Hm. I guess that kinda puts my gutters into perspective...