Spring Prep Part 2

A few weeks ago we did a post about Spring Prep. I feel like we will be prepping for Spring until Fall comes. It's just a theory. Owning a home now brings new challenges as the seasons change. Digging a car out of the snow in the Winter, now turns into solving the problem of the basement flooding in the Spring. As we begin to grow with our home, we will find a harmonious rhythm, until then, it's day by day!

Basement Waterproofing and Driveway Draining

Our home is situated on a nice chunk of land. It's pretty unique, and we love it. In this case, the good comes with some bad. To understand our basement it to understand our driveway and garage. Take a look below, I circled the tricky parts and I will explain why....

The first image shows our only drain in our driveway. It's 1/2 dawn the driveway and have a very shallow collection capacity. The other circles ate where the driveway meets the garage, which is connected to the basement. (A light bulb just went off in your head, didn't it!?) There is no drain there. We plan to tackle this with a French drain, and show you how to defeat a negative slope! A huge challenge will be getting rid of that slab of cement. I know it's hard to see because it's overgrown with weeds and who knows what else, but to our surprise, the end of the driveway does in fact have a slab of useless cement we need to destroy!

With that being said, step two is to water proof the basement with Damplock Concrete Waterproofing Paint. We plan to do this ourselves. The reason we are waterproofing the basement is because it can lead to expensive problems and will help eliminate mold and mildew. It's just like painting, and it's just a weekend worth of work.

Getting the Deck Ready for BBQ Season

Why our deck is red, we will never know! We will be stripping it down to it's natural state and adding some out door furniture and fun. We don't plan on keeping this deck forever, as we don't love the shape or functionality as it stands. But brining it back to it's natural state will keep us happy for now.

Some items we are thinking about getting are:

Creating a safe place for the dogs to play

Our pups are tiny. Rocket is 3 lbs 12 oz. while Porkchop is a whopping 6 lbs. They can sneak into and out of many tiny places. Our yard is wide open and not really pup friendly, so we decided to dedicate the side yard to them. The photos below are BEFORE we killed all the bamboo and made the pathway a bit more appealing. Right now we need to fence in the area properly, and then the pups can run around! We are over the top excited for them to have their own space.

So thats the unpretty, unfun stuff we have to complete this Spring! Trust us, there is a lot more to be done, but as my dad says "Take it day by day".

Spring Prep