#196 In which our hero prepares for what is most likely going to be a long, loud afternoon.

Today's the day! Basement waterproofing day! While I am looking forward to the permanent absence of water in my basement, I don't expect the process to be much fun. But, to feed my never-ending love of Schadenfreude, I thought I'd post an hour-by-hour update of the project. Weee!

Currently, it's 9:12am, and I'm waiting for the construction guys to arrive. Here's what the basement looks like right now:

After much moving around of shit, the basement floors are clear, and ready to be destroyed.

The hot water tank is awfully close to the wall... I wonder how they're going to dig around that?

Here you can see the smallest glimpse of all the crap I've stacked up.

And finally, the finished part of the basement. The corner you see above isn't the outside corner of the basement, there's actually more basement on the other side of the drywall. The waterproofing guy assured me that it wouldn't be a problem to tunnel under the wall without disturbing it. Can't wait to see that.

UPDATE: At 9:15am, shortly after I finished uploading the above photos, I hear a knock at my door. It's "Eddie," the crew foreman. He has bad teeth and reeks of cigarette smoke... not a good sign.

And hey, what do you know? By 9:16am there's already a problem. We have a radon mitigation system installed in the house, and one of the pipes that keeps the deadly radioactive gas from killing my family is right where we wanted to install the sump pump (as seen in photo #3 above). Eddie mulls this over for awhile, surveys the outside of the house, then announces that he has to call his boss to figure out what the hell to do about it.

Apparently the answer is "don't worry about it." The radon system is essentially a pipe stuck in the ground with a fan on the other side, and having the pump right next to it doesn't cause any problems. These guys are the experts, I guess. But I'm less concerned about it since the pipe in question is only one of two in the basement.

It's now 9:43am and I just saw the jackhammer go down into the basement. It is a no-bullshit LARGE tool, clearly designed to inflict maximum damange to concrete.

Ah, it's 9:49am and the jackhammering has begun. Not as loud as I had feared, actually.

Stay tuned for the next update.

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