Monday, July 13, 2015

Good morning crew,

A long time ago (June) in a crawl space far, far away...

The new house continues to keep life interesting for me. The most recent adventure is the sump basin in the basement. This has been something that has been nagging my mind the last few months since we have been getting some near record rainfall around here.

After hearing the sump pump clicking on with unusual regularity I decided to investigate, and what I found was a hole mostly filled with mud.

Now, I don't know too much about sumps or sump pumps, but I do know that they are supposed to pump water, not mud. So my first instinct was to call a professional and let them handle it - especially when it comes to keeping my basement from being submerged in 4 or 5 inches of muddy, smelly water.

But my wife, in a rare bout of parsimony, insisted that we should try to tackle the project ourselves. So she started sending me YouTube videos of industrious-looking do-it-yourselfers standing in clean, well-lit basements and replacing sump pumps in about five minutes using a screw driver and a pair of pliers.

But instead of a clean, well-lit basement what I have is a dingy crawl space, and instead of a straight piece of PVC connecting a pump with a drainage pipe by a screw-on coupling, I have what appears to be 30-year-old ironmongery welded into the plumbing and disappearing down a black, smelly hole.

So I still suggested we call a professional.

Then the wife pulled her secret weapon on me; she called her dad.

He crawled under the basement, took one long look into the black pit of despair, and then suggested something radical. He said, "Why don't you clean it?"

Not knowing what I was getting myself into I dragged the garden hose down the basement steps, grabbed a bucket, and started hosing and scooping.

Considering the cramped quarters I had to do most of this spraying and scooping while lying on my chest, using my hands. The aroma was...remarkable. And judging from the 12 or so inches of nameless muck and sediment I was pulling out of there that basin must not have been cleaned in 20 years.

I had a few choice words for the previous homeowners, I can tell you.

But eventually I completely uncovered the pump and scraped the basin down to bare clay, and considering that the thing was mostly encrusted in mud for however many years, it is a miracle it is still working at all. In fact, the wife found the manual for the original pump (that the previous homeowners had left behind) and discovered the company went out of business 20 years ago! Which confirmed my original guesstimate.

At least now I am more willing to take a swing at the rest of the job, now that I have done the worst of it myself. But I am still inclined to have a professional do it. If I screw it up myself I have nobody to sue.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

P.S. Did you miss an issue? You can read every issue from the Gophercentral library of newsletters on our exhaustive archives page. Thousands of issues, all of your favorite publications in chronological order. You can read AND comment. Just click GopherArchives

***
"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian." --Dennis Wholey

***
"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left." --Oscar Levant

***
Would you be more content with six million dollars or six children? Six children, certainly. Because a man with six million dollars will always want more.

***
Trying to do my share for the environment, I set up a trash basket at my church and posted above it this suggestion:
"Empty water bottles here."

I should have been a little more specific, because when I went to check it later, I didn't find any bottles in it. But it was full of water.


*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
My ten-year-old, under the tutelage of her grandmother, was becoming quite knowledgeable about the Bible.

Then one day she floored her grandmother by asking, "Which Virgin was the mother of Jesus: the Virgin Mary or the King James Virgin?"