This Winter Flood Made Me Do the Weirdest Home Projects

In the nearly eleven years I've lived in my house I've done a number of DIY projects. By far the strangest one I've done was getting ready for this weird winter flood.

New gutters on our house was a project I was planning on doing (actually, hiring done) this spring once the snow finally melts. But with as much as three feet drifted up around my house, and having some water get into the basement with the rain before the heavy snow on Saturday, I was really worried about all this rain being able to drain. What I realized I would have to do was remove some snow and modify the downspouts.

This is not a project I could have ever fathomed.

I went to the home improvement palace to get some downspout extensions to make sure the water drains away from the house. I thought I would only need two because two of the spouts were already six or eight feet long. When I got home I found that one was four and the other was 2.5. Another trip had to be made. But by the time I returned all of the handy flip-up models were sold out. The only other suitable option was a full ten-foot length of downspout.

Back home I had already prepped each of the four by digging a trench in the snow so that I could install them and ensure I knew where the water would run once installed. It took a little chiseling with the ice chopper on the frozen tundra, but I got them all installed and I don't have water in the basement.

When we bought this house in 2008, if you had told me I would one day be adding 10-feet to the bottom of my downspouts, while it was raining and I was standing in two to three feet of snow, I would have said that'll happen when the weed they were smoking was legal in South Dakota. I guess one of those two things happened.