The Joys of Homeownership

On Monday night we discovered that our basement had flooded. There was about an inch of standing water. It wasn’t completely unexpected since it had flooded once a couple of years ago, but it was still a shock. The first time it flooded we still had cardboard boxes stacked on the floor from when we moved in, which was a disaster. A bunch of photos and books got ruined. We learned from that experience and put everything in plastic bins and stacked them on metals shelves a few inches off the floor. So this time the water didn’t really damage any items. But it has still been a pain.

N. and I took turns sucking up the water with a wet vac and dumping it down the drain. He stayed up until 3am Monday night handling it and then I took over while he was at work. It was a little frustrating – as soon as the water was sucked up you could see more of it welling up from the cracks in the floor. But this morning it seems to have finally stopped. The floor’s still damp, but there’s no standing water.

We called a company that specializes in fixing this sort of problem, but the earliest they could come out is next Tuesday. The whole situation makes me worry about what it’s going to be like when we try to sell this house one day. No one wants a house with a flooding problem. The company that’s going to come out has a guarantee for the life of the house, so I’m hoping it will fix the problem and it won’t be an issue when we want to sell. I’m also hoping it won’t be ridiculously expensive.

We (I) have been taking about making some improvements to the kitchen for the past year and had set some money aside for it. I bought this year’s Consumer Reports kitchen guide and researched appliances and then over the weekend (before we discovered the flood) we bought some on sale. I had been thinking about also replacing our kitchen counters in a couple of months (my woodworking instructor does solid surface counters and said he would give me a screaming good deal), but they will have to wait if fixing the basement is going to be expensive. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. But I have a feeling that the kitchen counter money is now going to pay for a french drain and sump pump, which as home improvements go, is not nearly as fun (I know, I know…the tragic trials of yuppies are SO sad!).

Speaking of yuppies, I got to play around with the new 3G iPhone last night! It’s pretty cool. N. started a new job last week (as corporate counsel at a software company) and they gave him an iPhone to use. I would have been over the moon, but N. wasn’t really that excited: it’s just a phone to him. I’m kind of an Apple fan while N. is not (He thinks that a lot of their hype is due to elevating style over substance while I, on the other hand, have always had a weakness for style over substance.) Anyway, I was oohing and aahing over the phone and trying to show him some of the cool stuff it could do and his response was basically, “meh.”

Sigh. I think this might sadly be a case of casting pearls before swine.