My mountain cabin / hippie shack is built into the side of Topanga Canyon. It’s TOTALLY not-up-to-code. Tonight, in the middle of the biggest rainstorm of the year, water started pouring from the WALL on the bottom floor that’s built into the hill. It washed about a pound of silt onto my floor, and got to a depth of about two inches in places.
I got my landlord (he lives next door) and we went out to investigate. There was a big pool caused by debris against one side of the house, apparently that was seeping down next to the boulder and somehow into the house. When we cleared the debries and caused the pool to drain, the water stopped pouring through the THREE INCH HOLE in my wall. (Pictures to follow.)
Now, about that boulder. There’s a BIG rock, and apparently the hippies who built my house couldn’t move or blast it, so they just built the house around it. The boulder sticks into my house and is just plastered over. (There’s actually steps in it leading up to a little reading nook.) And as far as I can tell, the boulder is the only thing holding the house up. (I asked my landlord if the house was built on a slab foundation. His response? “Are you fucking kidding? It’s sticks on dirt. A couple of cinderblocks. And believe it or not, the place is legal. It’s old enough that it’s registered as a real residence!”)
He brought over a bunch of towels, and we swept up most of the mud on the bottom floor — thus far, my second floor has been blissfully immune to water problems. (Other than a few leaks, which just sprang up.)
Oh, one more thing. When I put my ear down near the boulder, I hear the sound of rushing water. And against the hillside wall of my house. Rushing water.
If I’ve struck some kind of underground stream, can I open a bottling plant? Want to drink Topanga Water?
Comments 6
Wow, good luck with that.
My hippie shack is built between an unstable sand hillside above and a unstable sand cliff below. When I came home this morning the hillside above came down on top of it, it’s not buried but looks like it could be if things get wetter.
All in all it’s a nice change from worrying about fires…
Posted 05 Jan 2008 at 9:19 am ¶Wow, Brett. That sounds WAY worse than my situation. I’m just wet and dirty, your sand cliff sounds a little scary. Still, you’re right. At least we don’t have to worry about fires for a bit.
Posted 05 Jan 2008 at 9:59 am ¶That @$*(&$#@(#$^!&!(#&!@(# stinks.
Posted 05 Jan 2008 at 10:21 am ¶Sorry to hear about the water damage… I was wondering how the rains were treating you, but that’s pretty trippy. Hope you’re covered with some sort of insurance or didn’t suffer much loss. (We just got through with dealing with some flooding of our own, but that was due to the upstairs neighbors doing some illegal plumbing, DeNiro-in-Brazil style.)
Our sole adventure with the rains so far was my wife’s car hitting a huge rock in Malibu Canyon and getting a flat… got towed out within about an hour but that’s not a fun place to be at 9:30PM with rain and bad visibility.
But, yeah, beats the fires.
Posted 06 Jan 2008 at 11:28 pm ¶geez- to think that I thought having rattlesnakes in the house was a bummer… So the question that comes to mind…moving?
Posted 25 Jan 2008 at 6:08 pm ¶Hey Michelle, can I borrow your pet rattlesnake?
I need something to get the rat that lives in my ceiling. That bastard’s been keeping me up all night practicing his dance moves and the neighborhood cats can’t seem to do the job.
Sorry to hear about your flood schof, my shack is still holding on, for now anyway.
Posted 15 Feb 2008 at 11:37 am ¶Post a Comment