New House....sort of!

*DISLAIMER.......This is a long wordy post.   I also vent a little too.   It is all for my record so feel free to skim through the pictures. :)

So our house.......it's quite the house.   We love it, but have had our share of problems.    Whenever the wind blows and it rains really hard, we get water in our basement.   Enough that the carpet gets wet and water drips from the window sills.   Now this doesn't happen very often, but it will ruin our basement if it continues much longer.     We have known about it for a long time.   When we get the flooding we try caulking, or other things to seal up our brick.   Then we have to wait for another rain storm before we know if it works or not.  (sometimes a couple years)   Several years ago we had some people that were stranded in a snow storm stay at our house.   The guy was a builder, so he told us what he would do, and what should be underneath our brick and such, so we had a good idea of what we were needing to do.    We had several brick layers from the area come out and look at it to see what they thought we should do.   Many suggested we clean the brick and then seal it.    It never was sealed.   So we tried cleaning it with acid...stuff they suggested.   In order to get it to come clean Darin had to use a lot of acid...which worked!  Until about a week later and it turned orange.     This is when we decided that the brick had to come off.  It would not come clean, and sealing it probably wouldn't stop the water problem anyway.

We started the task of finding a brick layer that we liked and would do some specific things that we wanted done.    We quickly learned that we would have to go outside of our area.   We tried a guy in Logan, and he was really booked, but he knew another guy....Long story short.... Randy Bingham became our life saver!!  I love this man!    We got a hold of him, he was able to come out the next day and give us a bid.   He said he could start on it the next week if we wanted him..   We decided his bid was a little high compared to the other 3 bids we had.  He came down enough and because he could start so soon, we had him do it.    It was perfect timing between jobs for him.    We had already picked a new brick...they no longer made the same brick...just our luck!    So we had the brick coming, we just had to get the old brick off the house before he could start.   We had 5 days!!  It was fast and furious.     The kids had a blast taking the sledge hammer to the brick and pounding the heck out of it.   It was amazing to see it fall to bits.

Along the garage.  Notice no house wrap.

No black paper behind the  top of the big window or house wrap.  Brick changing colors under window from being wet so often.

Doing the front part where the pillars were was interesting.    The kids had fun climbing on the back hoe.   We filled one 10 wheeler full of brick!    I am so thankful to be on a farm where we have access to equipment.   It would have been impossible without a back hoe and big truck.

The timing of doing this brick wasn't the best.   We were just about ready to start early beet harvest.  But we decided the timing would never be right, so we just needed to make it work.    Darin worked sooooo hard, and I did what I could.    It was actually fun to work together tearing down our house!

Darin dug a HUGE hole to put all the bricks in.    You can't tell in the picture how big it was, but it was big, and very deep.

We decided we should have put brick up the corners of the house when we originally built it, so we put had them brick up the corners this time.      The brick is super close to the old brick,   A little more brown.    We really like how it turned out.

All the other pictures I have of the house are on my phone.   I don't know how to get them to the computer.     We found several different problems with the home after we got the brick off.    We learned quickly, that taking the brick off is the only way we would have solved the problem.

1.  The house wrap around the house was not the right kind, and it wasn't put everywhere.   Along the west side of the house there was no wrap the bottom foot of the wall....right where the water would go to run inside the basement.   So the bottom 6 inches of the wood was moldy.   We replaced the wood on the outside all long the west and the front of the house.   I wish I had a picture.
2.  There was no flashing along the bottom of the brick.   On top of the foundation up the  side wall, so if water does go through the brick (which it will) it seeps down into the inside of the foundation.
3.  The brick ledge was installed at a flat angle......a few places it was tilting back towards the house.   So when water comes down the stucco it hits the brick ledge, and the wind pushes the water back into the house from the ledge and down the wall....which then goes into the wall because of no flashing.
4.   There was no flashing put underneath the stucco on top of the brick to prevent the water from running behind the brick.
5.  The front window was not installed correctly.   I have pictures on my phone.    The wood all along the bottom of the big front window was moldy.   There was also minimal house wrap here.   The window is suppose to be installed with some black flashing behind it...It was not.   I had a few people see the pictures and wonder how it even passed inspection.
6.   Our arch in the front was falling.    The reason for that was there was no pole inside the pillar to anchor it.   Also the pole on the other side was not anchored to the ground.  We could move it around.   Very uncool.   Our new brick guy promised us the new arch would not move.
7.   The mortar was very porus.  It looked like gravel.  Where most people's mortar looks like cement.    There was also larger holes in the mortar.  We could stick our car key in one spot.

So we put black flashing along the foundation.  We also put a metal flashing under the stucco on top of the ledge.    We have the correct house wrap around our WHOLE ENTIRE house!  Our brick layer was amazing.   So kind and wanted to do it right!   He drove from Logan every day for 10 days to get it finished.  I was so grateful for him.  I know my Heavenly Father placed him right in our way to help us.   We had some great experiences with people being in the right place at the right time to get this house done the right way.    What a project.

We have had some heavy rains and heavy winds this fall/winter....and we have had NO water in the basement.    I'm just not sure we had enough rain to make it leak into the basement.   I am confident that we got it all fixed though.       I think our builder should be glad we are not the suing type, or I think he would be footing the bill.   All of these problems that we found should have been caught by him and fixed in the building process.    As it was our insurance did not cover anything.   I am so grateful that we have the means to fix it correctly., so we can have a nice house for a long long long time.
I am so grateful to my Father in Heaven for helping me along the way.   I can see his help on several different ocassions.  Mostly by placing teh correct people in our way.   I love my home!   I can now cross one thing off my worry list :)