In the last post, I wondered whether rerouting the downspout drainage away from the house would be enough to avoid more flooding… Well, I decided that it was better not to take any chances, so I started digging. I’d already dug a little hole to check for drainage pipes, so it was just a matter of continuing. Lifting rocks isn’t exactly my strong point, so I’ve been doing it in small increments (all the while hearing the song “16 tons” in my head) but I’ve made it basically along the entire front of the house.

It’s been pretty dry for the past month or so, but the other day we finally got a good Hilo-style rain of something like 5″ of rain over 12 hours. That at least answered the question of whether doing all this digging was necessary, because when I checked it out in the morning, it looked like this:

Water pooling in the trench next to the house

After admiring all that rock I’ve hauled out of the ground, you probably notice that the bottom of the trench is filled with water! When I first discovered it, the water was more than a foot deep. Nothing had yet made it into the basement, but I wasn’t about to wait and see. After a quick trip to Home Depot to get a pump, I started pumping the water out.

The pump, which is supposed to pump 1500 gallons/hour, barely kept up with the incoming water when the rain was heavy.

First, the pump barely kept up with the incoming water, then the rain got heavier and it lost ground. The water level rose so it submerged the entire pump for a while, then it largely stopped raining and it made some progress. It took until late afternoon until all the water was gone. As the water level dropped, I could actually see water flowing out through the rocks under the house and into the pool!

I think what’s happening is that the whole yard is basically made up of a fill of these large lava rocks, lying on top of solid lava at some point. The rock fill is very porous, so the water will flow down the slope on top of the solid lava until it hits the house, where the concrete footing basically makes a dam which the water fills up.

As you can see in the pictures above, the water filling the trench is absolutely clear. It’s clearly not flowing through dirt. Whatever material it’s going through on the way has probably been washed clean over the years, which is good because it seems the risk of getting the drains clogged with silt will be minimal.

The drainage situation probably isn’t improved by the fact that the street facing the yard has no gutters. When it rains heavily, water comes streaming down the street, running off the side facing our yard. The neighbors’ yard is also higher than ours on the street side, so water probably also flows down that way. Maybe adding a surface drainage along the street would help? But first we gotta get the drainage around the house down. I’m almost down to a good level along the top side of the house, but there are some very large rocks that still need to be removed or cracked off so the drainage pipe can maintain a good slope. Then we need to get the pipe down along the side, too…

As I noted in the basement unfinishing story, the basement has moisture problems. I was curious to find out if there was any sort of drainage around the perimeter of the house, so I started digging down along the foundation. This turned out to be rather difficult. While it looks like the house is surrounded by gravel, I found that this is only the surface. The gravel quickly give way for lava rocks. This made it quite a pain in the ass to dig, but after some amount of digging and lifting foot-sized rocks, I made it down to the foundation footer. No drainage.

Now, how one can build an underground foundation in the rainiest town in the U.S without putting in a drainage system is beyond me. Maybe they didn’t know about drainage in the fifties? The house I grew up in has several French drains going around the perimeter of the house, and even today, almost 40 years after the house was built, there’s a constant trickle of water draining out of this system. I guess I figured this was something you normally did when building a house, but apparently not.

Anyway. One thing everyone says you should check if you have basement moisture problems is that the downspouts from the roof don’t discharge water near the perimeter of the house. There is a downspout coming down right at the corner where that basement room is, and while there was a pipe taking the water all the way to the property line, I wasn’t convinced this actually worked well. This is what the area looks like:

The downspout used to route in between the two walls over to the lava wall by the property line.

I didn’t take any pictures of the pre-existing setup, but the downspout went in between the two concrete/stone walls, past the red flowers, and terminated by the lava wall on the property line in the upper left. While this led the water as far away from the house as possible in that direction, the water didn’t really have anywhere to go. It was discharged between those two walls and, if anything, that area slopes back towards the house. During heavy rainfall, I’d noticed that the entire area in between those walls turned into a pool of standing water.

This picture kind of shows how the ground actually slopes back towards the house in this area. Not exactly how it’s supposed to be.

It’s hard to see in the picture above, but the lawn is quite a bit sloped towards the house here. As a consequence, the water pooling up between those two walls probably took the path of least resistance, which I suspect is towards the gravel bed around the perimeter. The lawn in the corner nearest the house, in the center of the picture above, looked like it got too wet, and the inside walls of the basement room look like the most moisture is about where that water would end up.

So I decided to improve the drainage. First I was going to keep the existing pipe and just extend it down the property line (to the right in the first picture). I got so far as to hack away the stone in the wall so the pipe could go through when I realized that to get proper slope on the drain I’d have to dig a trench right through the bushes next to the property line. This seemed like a lot of work.

Instead, I decided to just test how much difference it would make by re-routing the pipe down the side of the house all the way down to the lowest corner of the yard.

The new routing takes the drain all the way down the side of the house, across the lawn, and out to the property line.

This is sort of suboptimal in that it takes the pipe across the lawn. Not that we do anything on the lawn anyway, but for a more permanent installation we’d probably want to route it underground. This way we can at least see if it makes a difference to the amount of moisture in the basement. We’ll see in a week or two if anything’s changed, I guess.

While I was working with all that PVC pipe, I also discovered that it fits almost perfectly on the outside of the broken metal downspout on the lanai. The top part of the pipe that goes out and connects to the gutter has been missing since we moved in. When it rains, the water instead falls the 16 feet or so down on the rocks below, splashing water everywhere and making quite the noise. We’d tried to find a replacement pipe, but none of the home improvement carry metal pipe any longer. These days it’s all plastic. However, the PVC pipe just about slid on the outside of it.

This part of the metal downspout was missing, sending the water falling 14 feet down on the rocks below. The PVC drain pipe fit around it.

There are two small problems with this arrangement. The obvious one is that the pipe fits around the outside of the downspout, and you really want it on the inside. A generous helping of gutter sealant when sliding it on seems to have sealed it up, though. The second problem is that normally you attach the downspout to the gutter. Here, that would require either a 14-foot ladder or hanging down from the roof above. None of those options seemed really appealing, so instead I just hung it from the beam above with some steel wire. A bit ghetto, but it works. If it ever breaks, we’ll revert to the original plan which was to just replace the entire downspout with a plastic one. But that will still require fastening it to the gutter…

Finally, we got to the final step in our basement floor recoating project: actually applying the top coat. We used EpoxyShield garage floor coating, a two-component epoxy that hopefully will be pretty durable. As usual when it comes to painting, the actual painting takes a small fraction of the time compared to the sanding, patching, and cleaning.

Unfortunately we had a fair amount of rain over the last week (in Hilo, “a fair amount” is something like 10 inches or 250mm) and there is clear moisture in the west room where the carpet had been. It looks like we’re going to need to put in some sort of drainage around the perimeter of the building after all. (I can’t believe that in a place where it rains 200″ per year, you’d build a basement and not put in a French drain around the slab. Of course, this would have been easily avoided by not having a basement at all, per customary “post-and-pier” construction.

In any case, we did the rest of the basement, which is dry, so we can put that back in use. Using one gallon of the EpoxyShield turned out to be a perfect amount, it took us a few feet into the west room. And it looks pretty good.

This is what the applied EpoxyShield looks like, with the “decorative paint chips”.

Looking into the hallway towards the back.

You can still see the areas that I patched, because the top coat doesn’t soak into it like it does on the bare concrete. I don’t know whether it will still be visible after it’s cured.

The paint chips actually look pretty good. Kathy was very skeptical about the concept, but she came around once we started throwing them on. I hope the coat is thick enough that it sticks properly. I definitely saw some chips kind of lying on edge.

So hopefully that’s the end of the story for the back end of the basement. And I guess the next step for the front is to dig a trench around the front of the house and put down some perforated pipe.

After the grinding of the concrete in the basement, it was time to fill. I got some “EpoxyShield concrete patch”, which is basically a very thick epoxy, and started patching holes. First I just filled holes where stones or whatever had come out. (This is an endless task with diminishing returns… I wonder what the distribution of hole sizes are. It certainly goes up steeply towards smaller sizes.)

I was also using the vibrating multitool to get the remains of the carpet adhesive off from the corners and edges where the grinder couldn’t reach. In the process, I looked up close at a patch of dark concrete under the window (visible in the last picture of post #1) and decided the surface didn’t look good. The multitool did a surprisingly effective job demolishing it, the concrete looked kind of like dirt as it came apart. That certainly seemed like it would be a candidate for cracking and chipping after the top coat has come on, so I decided to fill it with patching compound.

This is the largest area of bad concrete that I filled. It was either soft and crumbling or had a very rocky and uneven surface. See the putty knives for scale.

There were more chunks of bad concrete where it either came apart like the first one, or it was already eroded so the rocks were the highest part of the surface, kind of like dimples. That also didn’t seem too good to coat over, so I ended up needing another set of patching compound before the filling was done

Luckily the concrete in the rest of the basement is in better shape. There were a few areas of the “knobbly” surface, but nothing soft and deteriorating like under the window. However, the area around the floor drain was very uneven, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to improve it so there would be less chance of getting little puddles of water sitting around without draining.

The

The area around the floor drain under the utility sink was also extremely uneven, like someone chipped out the slope down towards the drain with a huge chisel. I decided to “improve” it with the remaining patching compound.

Once the patches had cured, I sanded them down to be more even. Most of the sanding was done with either the DA air sander or with a random orbital sander. Sanding down into the concrete does a quick number on the pads, so I went through a number. For the more severe cases, like the floor drain, I used the multitool.

This is after a quick job of evening out the compound. Notice that I’ve gone through to rock in many places, which makes it very difficult to do a better job. It’s still way better than it was before.

After patching, it was time to clean. There was concrete dust everywhere, which of course needs to be cleaned off if the top coat is to adhere well. The instructions say to wet down the floor and then scrub with TSP. Then all the water and dirt has to be removed so it doesn’t just soak in again, and then rinsed numerous times. The trick here was to use the shop vac with a wet pickup nozzle. This is kind of like a squeegee mounted on a narrow, wide vacuum nozzle, and does a quick job getting the water off the floor. It would have been even quicker if I’d had a bigger shop vac, as it was it quickly got full with water and needed emptying. And it clearly was doing something, because the amount of silt and grit in the water was crazy. (The water showed no tendency to get cleaner with repeated rinses, so this is probably also one of these futile jobs you just have to call good at some point.)

Now the floor looks like this:

Here’s the floor after scrubbing with water, TSP, and rinsing numerous times.

Note how much less evenly gray the floor is compared to the first picture. That’s because all that gray is remaining dust, even after vacuuming several times.

The next step now is to let the floor dry thoroughly, and then we just might be ready for the top coat. It would really be nice to be able to use this room again!

The basement was advertised as “partially finished”. We weren’t sure what to think of that, it has the scary shower, affectionately know by us as the “torture room” since it would make a great addition to some serial killer drama. The three rooms were also “finished” in the sense that they had carpet floors, while the rest of the basement has concrete, and some kind of inner wall made of thin white paneling.

Obviously, we weren’t too fond of the carpets, but we became even less fond of them at some point last December when we got 12″ of rain in 24h (for reference, that’s about the average annual rainfall in LA…) and discovered that the basement was taking in water! Not much water, but you don’t need a lot to soak a carpet. After a mad dash to quickly move all our boxes out of the room and mop up most of the water, we’d had it with the carpet. (It was obvious from the moisture marks on the paneling that this wasn’t the first time, either. What on Earth were they thinking!)

The good news was the carpet came up pretty easily (probably because the glue and foam had disintegrated from moisture.) However, because the carpet went under the paneling, we had to rip out the paneling too. No great loss. And finally the studs they had put up to mount the paneling. We were now left with an “un-finished” room:

This is what the basement room looked like after ripping up the carpet and taking down the inner wall and studs.

Of course, now we were left with concrete covered with remnants of foam and old carpet glue. Since they had dutifully glued down the carpet over the nice wooden steps leading into the room, I brought out the remains of my favorite methylene chloride paint stripper to get it off.

To get the carpet glue off the steps down into the room, we brought my favorite methylene chloride stripper out of retirement.

The concrete also had these areas where it was turning into flaky dust, like this:

Some parts of the concrete was flaking up like this. The guy at the tool rental said this wasn’t concrete but something they used to level the floor a long time ago.

Clearly if we were to have any chance of coating the concrete with something, this needed to be cleaned up. The guy at Puna Rentals that I talked to about getting some machine to grind down the concrete with said this probably wasn’t really concrete but rather something they used to use to level the floor in the old days. It should come off without much problem.

Puna Rentals only had a gas-powered concrete grinder, which was not an optimal solution to run in a basement room, but Home Depot had diamond “concrete coating remover” blades for a floor buffer that could be used to clean off concrete. The blade was $60 per day, in addition to the machine, so there’s gotta be a fair amount of diamond in there…

The machine was pretty effective, but it made a lot of dust!

Here I am grinding away at the concrete. The concrete turned into this extremely fine dust that basically got optically thick so I could no longer see what I was doing.

In the beginning I had the doors closed to the room to prevent getting dust into the rest of the basement, and I could only use the machine for a few minutes before the dust was so thick I could literally not see what the machine was doing! After a while, the trade winds picked up and I opened the doors to get some airflow. This blew most of the dust out the window and kept visibility reasonable. There was enough dust blowing out that it turned the lava rocks outside white.

The dust cloud coming out the window. The window is actually a bug screen, but it’s so full of dust that it’s essentially opaque.

The “coating remover” blade was really quite effective. Here I’ve run it in the far corner, and as you can see, most traces of the carpet glue and stuff are totally gone.

It didn’t take long to get the remains of carpet glue and foam off, but the white flaky parts took some work. I also wanted to make sure the coating would have a fresh concrete surface to adhere to, so I kept grinding away. It removed a surprising amount, as evidenced by the fact that we ended up with upwards of 100lb of concrete dust in the trash can.

Most of the surface imperfections are now gone.

The end result looks like this. We now have a fairly even surface of healthy concrete, so there shouldn’t be a problem getting the coating to stick.

The final product, a pretty evenly ground down surface.

One possible issue might be moisture. I did a couple of moisture tests by putting a piece of plastic tarp down on the floor and seeing if we got any moisture, and I didn’t. However, the darker spot in the upper right sure seems like moisture. I’ll try again to make sure.

Since we had the machine for 24h, we decided to continue and work over the concrete in part of the rest of the basement. About half is in pretty good shape, with a non-slip coating on it, but the other half not so much. Unfortunately this meant that we had to clear out all stuff, and then we ended up with dust everywhere anyway. Just cleaning up all the dust practically took longer than grinding the floor did.

Next steps are to patch the holes in the concrete and get ready to apply the coating.

One of the remaining (massive) projects is to refinish the kitchen. It has built-in, what must be hand-made, cabinets, which really needed a makeover. However, after moving in, we realized that the kitchen (actually most of the old parts of the house) have lead paint. The top layer is lead-free, but the primer has lead. This includes the paint used on the kitchen shelves and cabinets. Not so awesome.

The advice regarding lead paint mostly seems to be “if you don’t have to touch it, don’t”. That might work on the walls in the rest of the house, but the paint in the kitchen is not in such good shape, and bumping into the shelves results in little chips of lead paint. So rather than paint it over and then worry every time we have paint damage for the rest of our lives, we decided it was better to get rid of it once and for all and then not have to worry again.

This is an example of the kind of shape the kitchen cabinets are in.

A closeup of the questionable condition of the paint on the cabinets.

Now, the first order of business is to safely strip the paint without contaminating the entire property with lead. This is worthy of a post itself, so here I’m just going to say it’s a bitch. Once the cabinets are stripped, they look like this:

Here’s a cabinet after stripping. I’m not sure what the wood is, but it has quite a noticeable grain pattern.

Kathy took charge of the color selection, and we looked at different paints. Since we’re going through such a pain prepping the cabinets, it doesn’t make sense to use anything less than the best paint available. We’re going with Fine Paints of Europe, which imports Dutch paints to the US. (They also have a bunch of movies on their web page talking about how cheap and poor quality most American paint is, which of course appealed to my Europe-is-superior sensibilities… 😉

The walls of the kitchen will be green, and the trim an off-white. The center panels of the cabinet doors will also be green. The trim paint is ECO Brilliant, an oil paint that has a very shiny and durable surface. The wall paint is Eurolux Matte, a water-based, matte paint that still is easy to clean, with their Oil Primer/Undercoat as primer. To get an idea of what it would look like, I went ahead and painted up a test specimen.

I went ahead and painted one door all the way through to see what it would look like and make sure we liked the color.

The test door put into its place. The new white has a slightly warmer tone than the old one. This was intentional, because it makes the yellowing with age that happens to oil paints less noticeable.

We liked the color. However, the surface quality leaves much to be desired. There are dings and scratch marks from the scraper used to get the paint off, and the grain pattern of the wood comes through very prominently. Given the amount of work that’s going into this, such an outcome was not satisfactory.

This closeup shows how visible the scrape marks and surface imperfections are in the new paint.

So, the surface has to be “fixed”. In principle, we could sand the cabinets, but there are still lead remnants in the wood, so sanding would send clouds of lead-contaminated dust. A better solution is to build up the surface with someting that can then be sanded down. (The same principle as using a skim coat or high-build primer when painting the motorcycles.) While spackling paste can be used to fill in the deep gouges, it’s not very good as a skim coat. Fine Paints comes to the rescue again with a product called Brushing Putty. This is essentially an oil-based very-high-build primer that is painted on with a brush and then sanded down to a smooth surface.

Brushing putty comes to the rescue.

After painting the cabinets with it, they look like this:

After being painted with Brushing Putty, the cabinets look like this.

Then the sanding begins. The product is pretty impressive, as it sands down to a glass-smooth surface. However, it takes a fair amount of work, and while the big flat areas can be done with a palm sander, in the corners you have to do it by hand. It’s going to take a lot of work, but I think the end product will be awesome. I’m currently working on sanding a batch of cabinets, and when that’s done I’ll paint another test subject. Stay tuned.

A shelf with sanded Brushing Putty. Note how the grain pattern of the wood has been filled in. It’s hard to appreciate the quality of the surface in this picture. To get the best surface, you should not sand down to bare wood. However, these shelves are in such bad shape and aren’t really visible anyway so I’m not going all-out here.

It’s very common for garages in Hawaii to not have doors (in case you wonder, that does not make them carports. Carports have to be open on at least two sides, or something like that), and ours didn’t.

Here’s the garage as it looked when we moved in. There was no door, only this big “arch-shaped” doorway.

The problem with having no garage door is that most people also don’t have motorcycles, and given that theft is a problem in Hawaii, I didn’t really want to have the bikes outside. (This was even confirmed by the movers. When they rolled the bikes out of the Matson container, they told me to not leave them in the garage as they would get stolen.) So, one of the first things we did upon arriving was to call a couple of garage door companies. We liked Kobay Garage Doors, so we went with them.

Things got a bit complicated because, as you can see in the picture above, the garage has these diagonal beams supporting the roof. This means there’s not a lot of vertical space for a door, so they had to use a special door that can turn a tight radius or the door would have to be very low or very narrow. That, on top of the fact that we wanted a flush door instead of the common “carriage house” model with a matrix of squares, meant that there was something like 6 weeks delivery time. Oh well, can’t be helped.

But before the door could be mounted, they had to build a frame for it. When Kobay showed up to do this, they discovered our leftover planks from the kitchen doorway, so they used those instead of plywood. This way it matched the existing garage a bit better (though not really that well).

This is after adding the frame for the garage door.

The framing used very rough lumber, and the planks from the kitchen were white. To protect the framing from the elements they had to be painted, but luckily I had 6 weeks to do that… The first order of business was to wait a couple weeks for the wood to dry — it was soaking wet when they added it. I guess this happens often in Hilo.

Anyway, after a bunch of sanding, spackling, and painting, the frame was ready for the door. I concentrated on the inside first, since access to those parts would be blocked when the door was mounted.

Here’s the painted frame. The yellow paint used on the inside was mis-matched by HPM, so it’s totally the wrong color.

HPM had matched a pint of yellow paint that I used to patch some parts on the house that were flaking. They also recognized the brown used on the framing as “Tudor Brown”, so I also had some of that. However, for the garage I was going to need more than a pint, so I went back and got a gallon. However, when I started painting the inside, I noticed it was a distinctly different color from the pint… It didn’t matter much for the inside, so I finished that up, but then I went back to HPM. Turns out whoever mixed the gallon had used the wrong base. They happily took the useless gallon back and mixed up a correct gallon for me.

Finally, the door showed up and in a few hours, Kobay had it mounted. Now all that remained was the outside paint. The entire garage is a different yellow than the rest of the house, a much more sharp yellow. Because of this, I repainted the entire front. After some TSP washing, light sanding, and scraping of failing patches, two coats of yellow and brown trim, it was finally done. It looks pretty good, and the brown actually matches the brown color of the door itself pretty well.

Here’s the repainted front of the garage, now with a yellow shade that matches the house and with the “Tudor Brown” trim.

The only problem, and I should have thought about this, is that the dark brown garage door gets super hot in the afternoon when the Sun hits it. You literally feel the heat radiating from it inside the garage. Maybe at some point we’ll repaint it yellow instead.

So can I now take the bikes out from the basement and park them in the garage? Not quite — the entrance at the back of the garage doesn’t have a door, so it’s still no more secure than before… Besides, the garage is being used as painting/sanding station, so the bikes are probably better off in the basement for a while longer.