The past week brought days of heavy rain in Detroit. It was gloomy and dark, and the cold came back.

The rain was significant. The backfill dropped six inches

This was a perfect opportunity to test out all the basement foundation repairs we made earlier in the month, though, so it’s not all bad. After two straight days of downpour, I went into the basement with bated breath.

Every area that we patched was dry.

It worked. All the digging, all the sweat, all the days of pain were all worth it. Every area that we patched was bone dry downstairs.

Now, the bad news. There was still a puddle in the laundry room.

This was along a wall we didn’t patch. Therefore, that means we have to break more concrete and dig another big hole, by hand (it’s between the houses, so the backhoe won’t fit).

In the big picture sense, it’s not that big of a deal, especially considering what we’ve done already. So we have to dig another hole and get more tar. Whatever.

When the rain finally let up, it gave us an opportunity to get back in the backyard and do some significant cleanup. We found a large number of seemingly randomly buried ceramic blocks and bricks all over the yard. Perhaps a previous tenant can enlighten us as to the rhyme or reason behind this. Some of the buried bits included ceramic with extremely vibrant, bright red glaze:

There were also bricks, fake Greek column pieces, and… gravestones. Yes, gravestones:

It’s probably a scrap or a sample from a headstone company, but still… what the heck was going on back here?

We haven’t done too much inside this week, other than clean. It’s getting tiring, actually. Clean, clean, clean. The bathroom is ready for painting, so that’s significant, but we’re still waiting on electricity to be done on the first floor and we’re still trying to nail down the boiler situation. We had been trying for weeks to get a sponsor, and we had an opportunity that looked quite promising, but today they contacted me and told me they weren’t interested, so we’re back to square two with the heating situation. I’d say square one, but at least we have had one company out to audit the system and we know what’s wrong with it.

We need to get a dehumidifier in the house to dry everything out, and probably start tiling and painting the bathroom. And so Spring marches on.