I spent much of the day to day viciously malleting slot-and-stem industrial shelving together, only to find that I had done so, for all six shelving units, upside down and backwards.

My arm is quite sore. It’s heavy work for a keyboard jockey, I assure you.

Yesterday was a record day for rainfall in the region, and we discovered that our 2000-square-foot basement warehouse space is unsealed. My friend Dave, who works for the city in environmental affairs and consequently has an encyclopedic knowledge of City of Seattle watersheds and flow patterns, tells me that there is an underground stream that runs parallel to Airport Way, in the shadow of I-5 as it runs south of downtown.

That stream was once a surface tributary of the Duwamish, but when the mudflats were raised to create today’s near south Seattle industrial district, the stream was filled and covered. In certain residential sections of Georgetown, houses that were originally built along the banks of the river can be identified by their considerably lower floor lines. In some locations, I have seen side-by-side houses with a lawn elevation difference of about seven feet.

What we found yesterday was that that stream runs close enough to our warehouse that a trickle of water entered the room in one corner, and pooled before running down the very slight slope of the floor to the rest room. Careful inspection revealed salt-like stains around every crack in the floor of the entire space – meaning that the floor level is probably only inches above the water table.

So, you know, the shelving is important. Eventually, we’ll have to build a rasied floor for the work area as well. Thankfully, one thing that exists in abundance just north of Georgetown is pallets. Fourteen pallets will fill a bay; we can build a work floor with little expense. Does plywood come sized in multiples of four feet?