Our Crawlspace

So this winter we started being a little concerned about the drainage in our yard.  We had a few holes in the yard when we moved in mostly around the edges of our yard next to the fence (however Jake did add a couple himself).  As the winter progressed and we got the Washington winter rain, the holes became little puddles.  The puddles stuck around all winter.  Tom had a whole idea about developing dry wells throughout the yard to get rid of the standing water.  Honestly, it made me a little nervous.  Tom has a lot of experience with construction and engineering but the thought of digging big holes in my yard with something neither of us had any experience with and we weren't sure would work was a little nerve wracking.  We decided to get someone to come in and give us an estimate for the job.  The main reason I wanted this done was mostly to get a professional opinion on what the yard and house needed.  I didn't want to spend a lot of money and effort on something that either wasn't needed or wouldn't work.

It turned out that we were told we didn't have to worry about installing any dry wells.  He said all we needed to do was fill in the holes that we had in the yard and the water would drain naturally.  He said the main thing to be concerned about was that the crawlspace under the house drained properly.  Water itself under the house isn't the problem, it's having standing water under the house that creates the problem.  Standing water can bring a lot of germs and infection under the house.

Tom decided this was something he could do himself, that we didn't need to pay someone else to do it.  He would prefer to do all the work himself if he could.  So, he bought himself this jumpsuit type thing at Lowe's to wear over his clothes and has been spending lots of time down in our crawlspace.  When we first had our house looked at before we bought it, we asked the sellers to clean the garbage out of the crawlspace and lay some more plastic down.  When we had the crawlspace checked later it looked better with the new plastic and we thought they had fulfilled their side of the bargain.  Turns out we were wrong.  They just laid new plastic over the garbage that was there.  Tom has had the fun experience of cleaning out the garbage and plastic from the crawlspace.

Tom's still working hard on it.  It's been dirty and crazy, but we still have a long way to go!  I've attached a couple of pictures of Tom working hard & Jake trying to figure out what in the world was going on.