lift & separate

so it doesn't look like much. but these are some of the jacks that were used to level my house.



it's a shame that the photos are so boring because this is actually pretty damn exciting. of all the gazillions of dollars that i've spent, this is by far the one thing that i'm happiest with.



if i had a decent 'before' picture of the porch, you could see quite clearly the difference. alas, i don't. it makes a huge difference, though, that when you walk in the house you no longer list & roll down hill. i can't find the picture with the crew foreman demonstrating the height of the final lift by sticking his hand in the gap between the house and the jack and splaying his fingers, but it turned out that it was raised about 6 inches iin the highest spot. awesomeness.



in the course of making the house level, the workers also discovered that i have subsurface drainage. this is huge. part of the reason for the whole funhouse lean to the place is because of standing water. oh, ok. the other part is because new orleans is really a swamp and everything sinks. having water pool in my backyard, though, does not help. so the leveling crew (orleans shoring) called out the plumbers they work with, and we got to work finding out the story with the drainage.



the newly discovered/uncovered drain runs about 70 feet down the side of my house. according to the plumbers and the shoring guys, the drainage system was put in around 1920 and is fairly standard in houses in mid city. to find out the state of my drainage, first they ran a snake down the length.



they put the hose in the pipe, both to gauge when the drain was opened and also to help work the snake down the line. it took well over an hour, but soon the water actually started to flow.



then they pulled out the video camera, and ran it through the pipe. this is how we found out that although the water will flow through the pipe, there are three breaks along the line.




next step is to have them come back out and fix the breaks. when they do, they're also going to put in two more ... drain openings (there's probably a name for them but i don't know what it is) to increase the surface area where water can enter the pipe. i'm going to call them next week, as i wanted to take a week off from writing huge checks.