The Basement

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a young family moved into a new house with eagerness and much anticipation. They have everything planned out, budgeted, selected, measured, and scheduled. Then, on the first weekend they moved into the house, it rained. And it rained. And it rained. And, when the family went down into the basement, they found that it was, well, just a little bit wet. How extremely frustrating! But, the family figured it was just bad luck, did their best to stop the water, called the home owners insurance, and dealt with it. Imagine their frustration, when the water extraction people left, after 14 days of de-humidifiers, special mold proof paint, and fans going, to have the basement flood again, 2 days after everything was "dry". At this point, the family starts to think, hey... maybe this is more than bad luck. Maybe this was a preexisting condition. However, not knowing what in the world to do with that knowledge, the family again, said "Maybe its not so bad. Maybe we are over reacting. We'll just pump it out, and deal with it."

No, we didn't call the water extractors or home owners insurance every time. We bought sump pumps, and, when the water came in, we pumped it back out. To date, the basement has flooded 16 times. You tell me: do you think it might have been something the previous home owners were aware of? After much deliberation, and I do mean much much muchiness, we went to see a lawyer. He seemed to think we had a case, and we proceeded from there. In the course of lawyer-ness stuff, and 4-5 months later, we have finally decided to drop the case. I won't go into much detail over the WORLD WIDE INTERNET, but we were unable to prove, without a doubt, that she knew about it, and decided to not keep spending money without a better chance of winning (our lawyer only gave us a 40% chance). Do I think she knew about it? Absolutely. In my heart of hearts, and my brain of brains, and my conscience of conscienceness, there is no way she could not have. However, I can't prove that she knew about something by proving that she didn't not know about something. Does that make sense?

So, now what? We have decided to fix the problem, still renovate as much of the house as possible, and just live with it, and hopefully, enjoy it. Amazingly, since dropping the case, we feel much better, and now we get to do the fun stuff (as well as the manual labor). Do I regret spending the money, time, and effort on the lawyer? No. Do I wish I had that money to spend on the house? Um, yeah, now that I have to fix the basement. But, I have come to grips with it, accepted it, and now, we are moving on....

The first thing we have to do, and I do mean the first thing, is fix the water intrusion issue. That way, when we go to sell the house, we can honestly say "Yes, we had water issues, but it has been dry for X years". We had several professionals come and quote us, and after deciding not to spend $12K+ on it, we are doing it ourselves. We are basically putting french drains on the interior of the basement walls, so when water comes up through the foundation (which we later found out it was) it will be funnelled out of the house.

Step 1: Hubby borrowed a concrete saw and cut the slab 12" from the wall.

Step 2: Jack hammer the stew out of those 12".
*Note the concrete slurry on the floor. Yeah, laundry was not a pretty picture :p*

Hubby had to re-plumb the hot water heater so we could continue the drains into the laundry room. It's so nice to have a handy hubby.

*Yes, that is a sweaty shirt. It was hot in the basement with no a/c* More cutting around the perimeter of the basement. Pop came to help. What a trooper! Thanks Pop!

Getting ready to cut in the other room.

There is the concrete saw. Ready for action. Down in the bottom left corner.

The girls and I stayed up stairs most of the time. But Dylan wanted to see what was going on.

Silly boy.

Course, this is just the first few steps. There is much more work, many more trips to the dump, and hopefully lots more pictures to follow. But, that is a good start for now....