Aftermath of the flooded basement (not bike related)

[Sidecar Bob]

I mentioned in the Weather thread about the ice storm that went through here at the end of March https://ngwclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... 05#p830016
and I posted pics of the damage here https://ngwclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... 20#p830071

My Dad installed a raised floor (1/2" plywood on 2x2 framing), painted the plywood white and installed peel & stick tiles. 20 years later those tiles started to let go and I've been talking about replacing them since. The flood reached about 2" above the finished floor before our neighbour's son showed up with a generator we could borrow for the duration.
I took some pictures as soon as the water level was below the concrete slab

01 - Shop Mar 31.JPG

02 - Shop Mar 31.JPG

03 - Furnace room Mar 31.JPG

The insurance company sent someone from a remediation company to assess the damage and estimate the cost of dealing with it. As soon as he left we started sorting & re-packing stuff and in a few days I arranged for a "seacan" (shipping container) to store the stuff we can keep

05 - Container Apr 9.JPG

And this bin for the stuff that is either water damaged or we just don't want/need to hang onto an more.

06 - Mini bin Apr 9.JPG

[Sidecar Bob]

We've been working at it steadily. The container is approaching half full and by Monday the bin looked like this. All of the big stuff (furniture &c) and the heavy stuff(scrap wood from the shop &c) is in there now and we hardly added anything yesterday or today so it's going to be picked up tomorrow

07 - Bin Apr 21.jpg

We've gone through just about all of the stuff that was on the floor now (hooray! I don't have to start every day breaking down the wet cartons we tossed into the garage the day before anymore) so now we're mostly packing up the stuff that didn't get wet.

The plan:
- I'm hoping to be able to start moving shelves &c out to the garage in a couple of days and then I'll start moving the stuff from the basement shop out there (I want that stuff where I can get at it).
- When the basement is empty I will call in a remediation crew to strip out the raised floors and deal with the mould. They will also remove about 2 feet of the drywall, panelling &c to make sure they get all of the mould & moisture damage.
- Once the basement is safe for occupation again we will move everything in the container back to the basement and try to stack things in the model train room but sorted according to the rooms they belong in.
- I am planning to move the wall between the train room and the pool room (the pool table will be gone) to end up with a larger train room and a decent sized storage room (it will eventually have shelves and everything put in there will be clearly labelled).
- Replacing the raised floor would be a big & expensive job and I'd still need to finish that so at this point I'm leaning toward just painting the concrete with some sort of epoxy coating or similar instead.
- The first room returned to normal will be the shop so I can access the tools &c to work on the rest of it, probably followed by that storage room and the rest of the rooms in order as needed. The last room done will be the train room and hopefully I'll be able to start building the proper layout not long after.

Oh, and I do NOT want to deal with anything like this again so I watched for generators on sale (after most people had their power back) and bought one of these

Generator.jpg

[Whiskerfish]

It sucks that after the fact is when we become better prepared. When Hurricane Isabel went through here in 03 it took me 7 or 8 days to find a small 110 volt generator, just big enough to keep my freezers and refrigerators running after everything had already gone bad. 6 or 8 years ago I finally got one big enough to run most of the house. Usually June first every year I pull it out and purge the gas and run it up with all fresh.

No fun what you are going through but a good time to sort out some junk!!

[Fred Camper]

But it will be much cleaner if that is a goal. I do like the idea of ditching the raised floor as that is always a mold risk. Epoxy would be much better.

[Sidecar Bob]

I'm thinking along the same lines. The idea of the raised floor is so that you won't be standing on cold concrete in the winter but we can always get some rugs if that's an issue.

You can't be prepared for everything all the time so you have to decide which risks appear greatest and prepare for them.
We've been in this house for 25 years and my parents were here for 6 years before that (from new). In all those years we have had a few small floods, all due to sump pump failures. After the 2nd failure I added a 2nd pump for backup.
In fact, the main pump failed a few months ago and the backup pump shifted (I blame the use of flexible HDPE pipe with no support) so that its tethered float switch fouled on the ridges inside the sump pit, resulting in a bit of water around the floor drain that I happened to notice when checking something else in the furnace room. Since I had to replace a sump pump anyway I re-did the plumbing for them while I was at it, this time using rigid ABS pipe and adding a support so that it can't move.

03 - 2 pumps in 1 hole.JPG

02 - Connection to outside.JPG

But of course they can only run if there is electricity. Power outages happen (around here usually due to a tree branch falling on a wire between towns during a storm) but the emergency crews are very good at finding and fixing the problem very quickly so they seldom last more than an hour or 2 and even when it is something big more than 24 hours is rare. The only other time I remember the power being out for more than a day was the big blackout of 2003 and that happened in the dry part of the year so the biggest concern was refrigeration. I contemplated getting a generator after that but even the after event sale prices were in the thousands and we had always managed without before....
This year was the first time I even looked at generators and I was surprised at what is available if you want to spend the money. Most (like the one we bought) are basically a Chinese clone of a Honda design with a small engine running a regular generator but the newer models use inverter technology that means they burn less fuel for the power generated and many can burn either propane or gasoline. Some are designed to sit outside all the time and are fully automatic, starting up and switching the house breaker panel (or selected parts of it) to be powered by the generator.
But to be honest, most of us don't really need a generator if the power comes back within a day so the last time we really needed one was 22 years ago. In fact, the generator we were loaned was bought after the big blackout and he never even started it until he brought it to us.
So we bought something more basic and a lot less expensive and I hope we never really need to have it. (Yes, we will use it for shorter outages if we have it)

[Fred Camper]

I do recall buying a generator after the 2003 black out where we had to borrow a generator for some 9 days. 6 months later we bought a 8 hp Coleman Generator. It stayed in the basement with no fuel for 10 years but in 2013 it had to go into service and since then it has been once or twice a year. I finally put a battery backup on the modem so the internet would not have to reset at each short outage. Then when I retired in 2021, my first job was a Honeywell 22KW whole house unit. I installed it myself so total cost was about US$5600. We still get outages several times each year but most are shorter than 2003.

[Sidecar Bob]

By contrast, our generator cost $500. Canadian. Delivered.

BTW, the insurance company has offered to pay up to $1000 toward having a battery backup installed for the sump pump. I may take them up on it but everything I can find online says the battery will only run the pump for about a day. I told the adjuster that and asked if he can pay half that much for a generator that will run the pump as long as I can get fuel for it. He said he'll pass the suggestion to his superiors but he doubts they will go for it.

And then there's the water powered backup pump. They connect to the municipal water supply and use town water flowing over a venturi to suck the ground water out of the sump pit. Sounds like a good idea until you find out that it takes a gallon of municipal water to remove 2 gallons from the sump. I figure if every house in our village of 750 had one of those they would empty the water tower faster than the backup pumps can keep it filled.......

[Fred Camper]

A water powered back up pump is not so bad however as it would run only when you generator did not. They are not inexpensive however.

[Sidecar Bob]

It might be OK if it had a better pumping ratio but one gallon of town water to remove 2 gallons is ridiculous. Consider that each inch of water in the sump pit is approx. one gallon, the pump removes at least 10 inches every time it cycles and during the spring melt it cycles on & off steadily.

[Sidecar Bob]

I'm not taking pics of everything but the train room is going to become a long term project so I wanted before pics. Model railroading was a 3 generation hobby in our family but I've inherited my Dad's and my son's stuff, including the room Dad was planning to build his layout in and the rudimentary benchwork he had put up. After we moved in I wanted to be able to run the occasional train so I laid down a loop of track and then started adding some sidings to park trains on and before I knew it I had en engine facility, a freight yard, one industry (a brewery, complete with a stack of beer cans to represent silos and boxes for the buildings) and even a few staging tracks that could hold complete trains.
But that was all temporary from the beginning. The framework was flimsy. There was no proper wiring. The track wasn't glued down. Temporary.
Anyway, this is what it looked like when I started lifting track
From the doorway to the southeast corner (freight yard)

01 - SE Before (Apr 28).JPG

Northeast corner. This was where the brewery was. The track plan here is a switching puzzle called The Timesaver designed by a fellow named John Allen in the '60s.

02 - NE Before.JPG

The whole west end of the room was the engine yard (foreground) and staging (background)

06 - SW Before.JPG

05 - NW Before (Apr 29).JPG

[Sidecar Bob]

As I removed the track I sorted through everything else that was on the layout and moved most of it to the area above the workbench. By yesterday afternoon it looked like this.

03 - SE After.JPG

04 - NE After.JPG

07 - West after.JPG

After that I packed up all of the track for storage and started sorting the stuff on the workbench onto the layout above it so that I can put everything away and pack it up.

[CYBORG]

I love the idea, and concept, of a train room. Are your trains HO scale? I've thought about my basement. And with our long winters, it's starting to look like more fun the jig saw puzzles.

[Sidecar Bob]

Mostly HO but Matt was mostly into N scale and I have his stuff too.

[Sidecar Bob]

Can you believe that much stuff was on that little workbench?

08 - Workbench sorted.JPG

The layout is gone. I have someone coming to help me take the cabinets out in a few days. I left the workbench for now because all of the stuff on it belongs in the basement shop and there is no room to move in there (I'll start on that soon)

10 - Layout gone E.jpg

11 - Layout gone W.jpg

The benchwork was a light framework made of 1x3s with mostly homasote on top (I used offcuts of drywall in a few places). I considered taking the frames apart but decided that i might want to re-use some of them (if I do I'll strengthen them) so I stored it all in the garage

09 - Layout parts stored.jpg

In the meantime our old dishwasher finally gave up. This wasn't a big surprise and we'd been planning to replace it but the timing wasn't great. Anyway, the new one should arrive today.

[Whiskerfish]

Yea waiting for an appliance to die is not fun. We bought our current Refrigerator just after we moved in here in 06. Just under the 5 year mark they replaced the internal coils under warranty so even with that we are almost to 15 years. I have looked at replacements and for the size and style it looks like about 1500-1700 USD. Knowing my luck it will crap out while we are on the road in august