Owning a home comes with many repair and maintenance projects. Some of these are small, and others are large but the best are the ones that make you want to run, hide and pretend you never owned a home in the first place. This window well was one of the 'best' projects we have ever had.
Our window well would flood whenever it would rain, causing the water to leak into our basement thorough the window and with this 'little' problem we wouldn't be able to finish our basement until it was fixed. The problem was that there wasn't enough gravel down there and way too much clay, the water couldn't drain fast enough, so it would drain into our house.
Even though it was always bright and sunny on the days we worked last summer, we would still hit water every time we dug because the clay would hold on to it. So as you can imagine, it was rather difficult digging... It was muddy and you would sink into the ground as you worked. More then a few times our shoes would get stuck along the way, when you pulled yourself out, your foot would come but your shoe would stay behind...
We ended up putting a small board to stand on down there, it helped to evenly distribute our weight so we didn't sink as much. The only downside was that when we needed to move the board around, it felt like it was super glued to the ground!
The only way to get the mud/clay out of the window well was to fill up small buckets, then hoist them up over our heads to a person waiting. They would then dump them out and bring it back. We had two buckets going so there was always one being filled as either Dave or David would bring a filled one to the backyard to dump out.
Our lovely pile (not even completed yet)... We put it on the cement slab in the backyard so that all that weight wouldn't ruin our grass.
We would take turns with digging and pulling up the buckets and dumping them out. You can see we tied ropes onto the buckets so that one person could pull them up as they were being pushed up, it made it a bit easier. We would switch jobs frequently so that no one would get hurt or too tired. It was some crazy manual labor!
After we had dug deep enough (see how far underground Dave is? It wan't easy switching jobs, just climbing in and out of there was a workout!) We then put the large basin down the window well, its purpose is to catch the water and then you hook up a pump that would shoot it out and into a drain (keeping it far away for our basement!)
The small amount of gravel that we had dug out, we then used to fill part way around the tub. We would just push some in and then whoever was in the well, would smoothe it all out and make sure it was evenly distributed down there.
We would pound the rock into the mud so that it was a little more solid before we placed the tub and finished putting our leftover gravel around it.
The job was huge, muddy, backbreaking, time consuming and since we did it ourselves, cheap. The whole thing was a ton of work and took us around two weeks, we worked about 3 days a week after we got home from work and then over the weekends until the sun went down.
My younger brother David was kind enough to help us (even though he had sworn off ever digging again after helping his friend dig a huge hole to repair a burst sprinkler pipe) He worked hard, but he is still a teenager and every time I would tun my back I would see this! Even though he was caked in mud, he would whip off his muddy gloves and start texting :)
