Our own Niagara Falls

Pretty, isn't it? Too bad it's not supposed to be doing that.

The white pipe is from our sump pump, which keeps the water from the spring in front of the house from turning our basement into a swimming pool. This pump has been going 24/7 since we started getting snows and thaws. Whoever ran the pipes for it did a pretty poor job. When we moved in, a section of pipe had broken and eroded all the dirt above and around it. And last week we saw that another section had broken about a foot away from the first break and was creating another mini-lake in the yard. So I was already planning on ripping the whole thing up to dig a deeper trench that would be more frost resistant.

This ice show just happened today I think. The coupling broke, and the water coming down from the house is hitting the broken pipe and spraying all over the place. I don't want to think about how much of the water is just leaking back into the basement. Although the basement could probably benefit from a good flood, if the furnace and hot water heater weren't down there. Some more pictures to give you a full view of what you get when you buy a hundred year old house.

This is the hole where the sump pump is. I have no idea how deep that hole is, I only know that it is currently filled to the top with water. Where the water is coming from is also a mystery. There is a gravel filled ditch that runs the length of the basement, and I think that any leaking water from the walls is supposed to be channeled from there into the sump pump hole, but I really don't know if that's what is happening.

The reason I don't know is that I try to spend as little time as possible down here. Even at my height, I hit my head on the ducts. And those are the stairs on the left. The steps are only about half the width I'm used to, so you have to watch every step coming down.

But I do think this is pretty cool. The wood beams that support our house, that were put in place a hundred years ago, still have bark on them.