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Post soundtrack: “Little Sister” by Elvis Presley

The east side of the old adobe house in town we affectionately call ‘Casablanca’ was sucking up water like a sponge and we needed a more permanent intervention to ensure our new adobe work inside would hold up for the next 80 years. We put in a triple defense system to help curb the surface water runoff from the highway on the north side. This included drainage channels and catchment ditches, a percolating driveway surface, and a berm running the greater width of the lot that closed the main driveway. With the east side driveway now closed to vehicular traffic, we could reconfigure the yard to be the place of rest for a 1,000 gal cistern to catch the roof runoff via french drain. Again, very little professional consultation here. No matter the methods, all the advice we were given aligned on the main idea to move the water away from the walls. Period. Read on to see what we did and find out if it worked…

Continue reading “Little Cistern, Don’t You…” →

You can see how we addressed the inside of the garage in Part I, but there was a lot more going on outside to resolve the below grade drainage causing problems inside our old adobe home that we’ll share here. Mainly, we still had to divert the water coming downhill toward the house from the north and west side. (You can revisit our work to first repair the interior living space that suffered from over-saturation of moisture on the west side here.) Without any professional consultation, we devised an action plan to install a triple-feature surface water defense system. Without any additional heavy equipment, a lot of on-site material was dug out, relocated, re-positioned, and thoughtfully placed for new useful purpose. We actually had a lot of compliments on the outcomes we achieved here facing the highway when all was said and done, but the real win was that the garage is now dry! Read on to see what we did…

Continue reading “Below Grade Garage Gotcha (Part II)” →

So, we’ve written a few times about ‘bonus projects‘ and this part of the Casablanca renovation was full of them. The main issue here was that water flowed freely into the garage under the door because the whole house was built below grade. With about 80 years of settling in place and modern road improvements out front on the highway, we were about three feet below the crown of the road that shed water directly over the unfinished driveway into the large opening. Add the fact that this is the north side of the house so any accumulation of rain and snow would not melt/dry up in any kind of hurry. The result was pooling water inside cracking up the concrete pad and soaking into the adobe walls behind the cement-based plaster, causing ‘adobe muerto,’ or adobe death, according to my invaluable guide, Adobe Conservation: A Preservation Handbook. Read on to see how we confronted the reaper…

Continue reading “Below Grade Garage Gotcha” →