“Delay” or ” Temporary Service Degradation”

I went to post a few nights back and the Web site was acting weird and glitchy, so I couldn’t. I was able to go to Typepad‘s (my blog service provider) homepage and they offered this explanation: Temporary Service Degradation. What a phrase; how about: "Our site isn’t working"?

Anyway, all I was going to say in that post is this: What do you get when you mix 10 inches of snow with 60 degree air and another inch or two of rain? You get a lake in the neighbor’s yard and a swamp in my basement.

So, yes, we did have another traumatic flooded basement experience–this one the worst one yet. We started pulling water out of the carpet on Wednesday night and have continued through this morning. For the most part, we averaged about 3 gallons every 10 minutes or so, putting our total water displacement at an absurd 900 gallons. Cut that in half to compensate for times it wasn’t quite that intense (though there were times it was more so) and we’re still looking at 450 gallons. Taking those estimates (which are very rough) and calculating with our house’s square-footage, we would have had 1-2 inches of standing water had we not intervened–and that’s with a functional sump pump.

I took Thursday and Friday morning off of work to deal keeping this from happening. Scott and Clark joined me Thursday.

Friday morning we met with a representative from EverDry, who walked us through what it would look like to have them fix it permanently. Let’s just say the process isn’t cheap. But it would be something we’d have to do were we ever to want to sell this house (value goes down 25 percent on houses with leaky basements) and would actually be a good selling point (usually 110 percent return on investment with basement waterproofing).

The real kicker is that it appears the previous owners didn’t properly disclose the situation in the seller’s agreement. So, as EverDry does their work, they’ll be photographing evidence the situation existed before we bought the home and documenting that the sellers are liable and obligated to pay for the costs of waterproofing and replacing our damaged carpet.

In short, we’ll likely be suing them. I don’t really like how that sounds, but I also don’t like having to labor over our leaky basement every time we get a hard rain or facing the thousands of dollars in damage and repairs we’re looking at. We aren’t looking to ruin the family–just have our costs covered.