Preparing for the rain

We had some rain last Wednesday and looks like there will be more coming tomorrow thru Friday!  It was a bit hectic trying to get the house ready for the rain as I also had to get ready for my uncle and aunt's arrival from England.  I'm so glad Graham and Charlie helped me with the trench in the front:

Assuming the boys did their work properly with the level, the water should drain towards the driveway.  I decided to set a rubber ducky in the trench as an experiment.  Will keep you posted on how that goes!

In the meantime, the roofer did come back and caulk this gap that's on the flat end of the roof:

More areas exposed but nothing a jar of tar from the home improvement store can't fix :-)

And oh, I also bought something for the garage.  I wish the manufacturer would have mentioned that there is no tape underneath this strip:

So at the same time at the home improvement store, I also picked up some liquid glue.  This thing is stuck on pretty good for now!  We did have some water come in before into the garage from previous rains and so far so good from the last rain.  The rain tomorrow looks like a big one, so fingers crossed on this and also the roof!

The standing water is not good but thankfully it all dried up pretty quickly:

My handy-dandy work on the sticky black tar:

More standing water... perhaps we would have moved out by the time more damage is done on this ;-p  And oh, some animal poop on the other side too.   Still didn't figure out what animal but we have seen cats, raccoons, and even a skunk around the house!

We come home from dinner after the rain and find out that my rain barrel in the backyard had fallen over!!!  Thankfully it did not pull the roof-post down as the barrel went down.  It did crush the spout in.  I tried to hammer it back out but that didn't work:

Looks like my rain barrel stand didn't hold up at all!  I did not realize that it was actually made out of thick paper and once it got too wet... well, you can see what happened:

I had Bobby pick up some cinder blocks which I should have done in the very beginning.  The ground is not very level so it's been a bit tricky trying to level the rain barrel.  Attempt #2... let's see what happens during this next rainstorm.  LOL!!!