Horrific floods in Ellicott City - Maryland and walk-up walk-down basement drain problem

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This past week, Ellicott City, Maryland had one of the worst floods in a long time. You can see some of the devastation that it has caused in this link . Fortunately, only my basement had a little bit of flooding. But interestingly, this has been the second flooding in over a month. This made me question the drain at the bottom of the walk-down/walk-up basement.

Here is a picture of the drain at the bottom of the stairwell.

<img src="/img/2016/08/20160731_191444.jpg?w=300" alt="20160731_191444"> As you can see the drain hole not the best and it gets blocked with just a few leaves and dirt. I have been clearing the dirt and leaves regularly but when there is a storm, the water floods down from the adjacent wall bringing with it debris which end up clogging the drain hole.

As a first fix, I tried this from HomeDepot. It’s called a drain trap. (shown below)

<img src="/img/2016/08/trap1.jpg" alt="trap1"> Again this was good but it did not solve the problem. So I decided to try something different. I needed a frame that was at least 1-in tall giving the dirt a place to settle around it and not flow into the cavity. I also need it to be sturdy where the weight of the frame keeps the mesh/trap down to the ground even in moderate to severe thunderstorms. I searched online for a solution and after spending quite a bit of time searching through blogs, I decided to build one myself.

So here is the finished product:

Here are the materials I used to build this:

Chicken-coup mesh grill
four L-brackets
two tree stump posts cut to the size of the chicken-coup (to create a 1in thick frame)
Long plastic corner bead to keep the grill corners from cutting into me with rust over time
outdoor screen plastic to to add a second layer of filtering
Staple gun
Silicone used for household seals

Here is the frame upside down. It’s basically the wood is framed in against the chicken coop metal grill.

<img src="/img/2016/08/20160731_190524.jpg?w=300" alt="20160731_190524"> Corners are bracketed in to keep the frame together.

Added the finer outdoor plastic screen-door screen on top and kept them together with the staple gun. And the last step is to create a seal between the pavement floor and the frame.

And voila a gutter guard (that can hopefully withstand some rain). Keeping my fingers crossed.

I will keep this blog post updated as I improvise on my custom made gutter guard. Hopefully others can follow this blueprint and build their own gutter-guards.

Cheers.