There is a saying in the Chicago area that if you don't like the weather just wait ten minutes and it will change. We have just experienced an unbelievable week of changing weather.
About 10" of snow fell in the week before Christmas. The days it didn't snow were very cold. Several days the high temperature was around zero. When I went shopping the Saturday before Christmas the wind was biting cold to the point that I gave up shopping before I was finished. I just couldn't stand the thought of walking across another icy, wind-swept parking lot.
Yesterday, the Saturday after Christmas, the high temperature was 61 and it rained all day. You can probably picture the mess. The ground is frozen so no water can soak in. It all runs to the lowest spot. Roads were closed and any low spot in your yard had standing water.
As my Subject line suggests I did get water in my studio. It was discouraging after all the work we have done this fall but nothing was ruined and the new painted floor will be much easier to clean than the old carpet. The water was not coming in through any of the studio walls that had been repaired this fall. It was coming from a spot which we knew still had to be fixed in the unfinished work area. We were planning to fix it before spring. Foolishly we thought there wouldn't be any rain storms until spring. When we first moved into the house 23 years ago we fixed that crack but the pressure from the fall storm forced the repair out. Our carpenter said the newer epoxies will prevent that type of failure in the future.
A second leak was coming from the furnace room. We have never been able to find the source of that water. During the storm the carpenter who worked in the studio came over and thinks he found the source of the problem under the fireplace. He thinks he can fix it by digging down on the outside of the foundation but of course that will have to wait until spring.
My studio is between the unfinished area and the furnace room. The water was running from both sides through the studio to the low spot in the laundry room. My husband and sons manned wet vacuums all day to keep the water in check. The few things that we had to move to the family room were the miscellaneous cardboard boxes of stuff that had not been put away from our fall water problem and resulting redecorating. If I had finished the reorganization of the studio nothing would have had to been moved. Since we were home at the start of the storm everything was removed from harm before the water reached it.
Our backyard is a pond again. This is the fourth time in the 23 years we have lived here that the backyard has filled. The annoying thing is that two of the four time have been within four months of each other. The neighbor two houses west has lived in their home for 28 years and only had water in their basement twice, this fall and yesterday. We will talk to the city but with budgets so tight I doubt they will do anything. My son borrowed a gas pump and 150 feet of hose from his office. The water was pumped from the backyard to the street in the front where it could run to a storm drain. The pump ran from 2 p.m. until 11p.m. keeping the water at a manageable level. This morning the pond is frozen but I don't think the ice is thick enough to skate on yet. As a child I always dreamed of my own skating pond in our backyard so I didn't have to wait until someone could drive me to the park.
Moral to this story---store everything in plastic tubs and keep them at least two inches off the floor.
Susan