My basement has always leaked a little, ever since we first moved in, in 1999. At first it was just a little seepage along the driveway side of the house. I remember the unhappy discovery that the pile of old wood and construction scraps that the prior owners had left there had actually been functioning as a dam.
On the other side of the house, there used to be some storage closets that we used for tools and paint and old toys, and suitcases, and I even used one of those closets for cookie storage, the one that had shelves and was against the outer wall, because it stay cool. That closet did flood one year, in an exceptionally heavy rain, but not even up to the level of the lowest shelf.
In the mid-2000s, when Al was in high school, we tore out those closets and made a room down there. We put in baseboard heat, but left the cement basement floor. It leaked from time to time, especially if we got rain in the winter on top of snow and frozen ground, and there was no place for the water to go.
For the last couple of years, since about 2014, the flooding has been worse in that room.
Towel dams in the morning in mid-December – after I had spent all night getting up & sopping. It went to 58 degrees on Dec. 13, 2015
I tended to blame it on global climate change, and bad gutters on the rental property next door. I had this elaborate system of buckets and towel dams. I’d lay towels – and old sheets and bathmats and even a mattress pad – down to dam the water, load the wet towels into buckets, replace with fresh, spin dry the wet towels in the washing machine, and then if there was time, dry them in the dryer. If there wasn’t time, I’d replace soaking wet towels with spin dried towels. The thing that was kind of fun about it was the towels were fresh and didn’t need fabric softener, because they were laundered in rain water – what all the laundry additives are trying to mimic.
But a few weeks ago, we came home from somewhere, and there was a square hole in the street, at the end of the across the street neighbor’s driveway, patched with new asphalt. Over lawn mowing, Mark got the story from the next door neighbors: in the winter, they kept hearing water running somewhere, but no water ever came into their house. They made a lot of calls, and finally talked to the city, and found out that there was a leak in one of the water mains under the street, and there was a kind of underground river developing. Somehow, ever since that got fixed, my basement has leaked less. Maybe there’s just less water in the ground under all of our houses.
Tuesday night the rain absolutely poured down, there were flood warnings – I was even getting alerts on my phone at bedtime – but on Wednesday morning, the leakage was little enough to be wiped up with a single towel. I had gone to bed with NO towel dams down, because twice I’d checked them for wetness only to find that the cats had peed on them – no longer rainwater fresh. Not sure what’s up with that – I think my old lady cats must be getting a little senile in their old age. One of them does seem to forget where her litter box is, occasionally. They should be happy now that all the kids cats have moved out, but maybe the peeing on the towels was some kind of reclaiming their space instinct.
Anyways, after wiping up what little water there was, I went for a walk – and came back to discover big diggers in the street – the square patch was to be replaced with new asphalt from driveway to driveway and sidewalk to sidewalk – all the way across the street. I just hope the new paving doesn’t make my basement start leaking again.
Digger in my street, June 15, 2016