Hot Water

Water, water, everywhere...

So, the Pacific Northwest has been deluged. It has been raining for days, sometimes very hard. We've been getting several inches a day, sometimes. It hasn't made for good moving weather. That's why everyone tries to avoid moving this time of year. Oh well.

Anyway, the electrician showed up today and redid the panel. It looks so much better with all that old junk out, and having that cabinet ripped out of that room gives us a bit more room, if only in terms of perception. It's no longer such a claustrophobic space, even if we can't necessarily use the walls that have been opened up. Now that the new panel is in, a lot more stuff works around the house, like light switches, baseboard heaters (turns out they all work), and, best of all, the hot water heater. Bless hot water. We'll actually be able to bathe. Well, sort of. The water pressure is only good in the kitchen sink and the master sink. Both the tub and the stall shower have craptacular pressure. The sink in the full bath is the worst of all. We'll have to see what we can do about that.

More importantly, the aforementioned rain has raised the water table. We experienced this firsthand as I dug the trench yesterday. What we learned today was that the crawl space flooded as well. That's bad enough- we don't want damp and mold growing under our house. What's really bad, though, is that the water seems to be contaminated from the leach field from the septic tank. Now there's a decidedly sewer-esque odor throughout the house. It's lovely. I guess the smell wasn't as bad this evening as it was this afternoon, and the water had receded a bit as well. We started the stove and some of the baseboards and are hoping that they'll burn away some of the smell and damp.

In the meantime, we're trying to buy a pump. So is the rest of Seattle, apparently. This summer we definitely have to come up with a drainage plan. We'd like to do it before that, but the ground won't dry out until then.

And more rain is in the forecast for the next several days. As long as the water level doesn't get to the floor joists, and the septic contamination stays at a minimum, we should be okay. We'll find out, won't we?