The Golan Home

I had some time to day to spend at the site. It was very hot and humid, and far from fun hanging out there.

Insulation primer was already put on the basement walls (that’s the black you see in the photo on the left), and Hosam’s team is already placing the wood on which the basement ceiling/ground floor will be poured.

I was glad to see that the “pooling” of the basement didn’t cause any harm, and Hosam should me how he got the water out. The good thing is that we now know where water is leaking through the walls, and the insulation guys will hopefully pay those spots extra attention.

One thing bummed me out. I planned on putting a storage area under the basement stairway. I didn’t see the engineer’s plans for the basement and didn’t realize that he blocked it, putting there a supporting wall. That really limits our use of the space there. I have to talk with the architects about it in the morning and see if we can resolve this some how.

Someone over the weekend opened the water or played with the faucet and left the water running. A hose ran from the faucet into the basement and the water started to accumulate. When Hosam arrived Sunday morning, the basement was full of water.

“You have a swimming pool,” he called to tell me. The wood he left so neatly in the center of it was floating nearly 1.70 meters (5.58 ft) above the basement floor. That is a lot of water.

Hosam brought a pump, but it was for draining shallow water.

When he built the basement floor, he placed three buckets in the English yard floor (it’s outside) and left them there. Se he simply punched a hole in one of them and within a couple of hours the water drained and disappeared in the sand below the house.

Just to put the whole thing in a climatic perspective, temperatures rose to 32 degrease Celsius (89.6 Fahrenheit), so a flood is the last thing anyone expected to see.

The basement walls are done, and now the wood frames into which they were poured are being removed. They will need to be watered for a couple of days.