dank

With spring temperatures, there is water everywhere. Puddles in the front yard, backyard, basement. When the new septic field was put in place less than five years ago, we suspect the people may have royally screwed up the drainage plane around the house. Copious amounts of dirt were presumably rearranged in the process, and it requires a smart thinker to keep the water flowing away from the house. There is no way the house would be in such great structural shape if the amount of standing water around the house right now is historically accurate.

So guess what we found under the floor of our exisiting kitchen? If you guessed a 7 foot-by-7 foot concrete box (six feet tall) with about 3 feet of clear, standing water you would be correct. And it is fucking creepy.

Our running hypothesis all winter was that the kitchen was a later addition to the house, since it "sticks out" of the original square footprint, attached to a 6-inch wall rather then an interior 4-inch one. We figured that it had no proper foundation, just a dug dirt crawlspace. It is always much colder in that space, which would make sense if it was sitting on dirt. We hoped the floor joists were structurally intact and didn't meet the same fate as the barn boards, which are crumbling from the middle of the floor outwards. (Tangent: our barn looks almost identical to this one, but with a better roof.)

Then my husband pulled up a curious spot in the hardwood floor that looked like a hardwood patch (like those around old flue holes in the floor) that was in a funny location. It was a hatch access door to the pit.

Turns out the reason our kitchen is so cold is because it is sitting on a pool of near-freezing water. We can't figure out the purpose. Root cellar? Extra well water? Flooded bomb shelter? And more importantly, what do we do with it? Drain it, obviously. But then...cap it? Leave it & insulate the floor? Use it as a root cellar and hope it doesn't floor next spring? Pack it with vodka for the end times?