Last year aboput this time I wnet on vacation only to return to find 3 inches of water in my basement (water softener broke)
Most of my basement is finished so I got new carpeting, new panelling, and new insulation for the bottom 2’ of the walls.
We are currently experiencing HEAVY rains (24 hour rainfall amount of about 10 inches and still raining). I checked last night and thinks were OK. At about 6 pm today I checked again and there was a muddy spot on the carpeting. Most of my carpeting is wet though there are dry spots. Looks like the floor drain overflowed.
At least there is no standing water.
And my new job starts tomorrow so I have no time off and don’t even know my phone #…
Our sewer backs up at least once / year. Since I’ve moved in I’ve had two pipes crack, flooding the basement (not including prior to my living here when my dad and nephews “fixed” the hot water tank, leading to a flood). In the laundry room is also the bump out from where the well used to be. However tree roots have caused the cinder blocks to shift. When it rains, it comes down the walls of the bump out. Suffice it to say I’ve been doing some mopping and leaving the dehumidifier running to try and dry it out down here.
I’m just trying to figure out what you people in Southern Minnesota did to piss of Mother Nature so. 18" of rain in some places, with more expected? Dang!
Things like this are the reason I will never refinish an area below the ground level. It’s just not worth it IMO. Locally here, every single person I know who has finished a basement has ended up tearing it all out within 5 years due to water - from ground water, stuck/dead sump pumps, leaking sump pump pipes, clothes washer overflow, water heater leak, air conditioner evaporator drain leak, humidifier and/or dehumidifier leak, inrush via the casement windows, cracks, plumbing and/or sewer leaks, sewer backups, or…well shoot, I’m sure there have been other reasons.
Last year, in “The Great Flood of 2006 (In My Neighborhood)” my best friends’ basement filled up to the ceiling with water. The creek from the backyard invited itself inside, perhaps to get away from the rain.
When they’d bought the house the basement was about 75% finished. All the studs, drywall, electrical and ceiling tiles were in. No carpet or paint yet.
Got to help them clean that up. It was icky, to say the least.
Every time it rains, I check my very un-finished basement 2 or 3 times a day. We’re at the beginning of a week-long rain storm here too.
I moved to KC about a year ago. I think I asked in a thread about buying a house with a leaky basement and what could be done to fix it. A few posters told me to run away as quickly as possible.
Would that I could go back in time and listen to them.
As it turns out, my back patio has sunk a bit in 30 years and now slopes towards my house, so I get a few square yards of my patio under a few inches of water every time it rains hard enough. And all that water runs into the basement through a crack in the wall that the previous owner supposedly patched. Water comes in the front of the house as well, probably thanks to the ivy the previous owner planted and which has now eaten its way through the basement wall, though I can’t tell for sure since the first owner half-finished the basement, just enough to keep me from being able to see where the water is coming in.
I can’t use about half of my basement because I have to leave that floorspace free for the water to flow towards the floor drain during big storms. Getting this fixed would involve tearing out and replacing the patio, plus putting some sort of concrete lip a few feet out from the front of the house to keep the water sloped away.
The really awful part is, I can’t get any of that taken care of because I already spent $2,000 getting new siding on half of the house and having the chimney box basically rebuilt in an attempt to solve a leak in my living room ceiling about which the previous owner failed to inform me. And that didn’t work, either.
When I was a teenager, I lived in the finished basement of our rented house. Whenever there were heavy rains the drains would back up and flood the basement. It got so that whenever it would rain for more than an hour or two I would develop a sense of dread about it. It is forty years later and I have no flooding problems, but I still get that sense of dread whenever it rains heavily.
We just paid $4000 to replace a section of our sewer pipe that a huge tree root had taken up residence in. To add to that, we had spent almost $750 before that on various drain cleaning services/plumbers in the past 1.5 years before we knew about the root. Homeowner’s insurance will only cover a small part of the clean up costs, but none of the pipe repair.
There is an area in our city that suffered water in the basement due to an oops by the city.
Oh wait, it wasn’t water - it was raw sewage.
It came up to about 2 metres in some houses - Yay! Our the drains, shower heads, tubs everything. The owners barely had time to grab things like family photos.
The city paid for the clean-up - driving by was sad - so many belongings stacked outside.
Now some of the houses are testing positive for toxic mold.
I had water in my basement but at least it was fresh rainwater.
SanibelMan look at having a firm come in that raises slabs of concrete by injecting foam under the slab. They can raise the end by th house, for less than a new slab being put there.
I would rather have a severe drought instead of flooding rains. The rains are worse. Every thing rots, molds, and gets washed away, besides the flooding killing the crops as dead as a drought.
Good news: The panelling looks OK. The carpet can prob be saved (the cleaning guys rolled it up, removed the padding, and I now have fans blowing under the carpet)
Bad news:
it probably wont be covered under insurance – I did not have the sewer backup coverage (not that is what happened, unless that also means storm sewer)
I’m not alsone, lots of uninsured damage - and I don’t have 2 feet of mud and/or a house 20 feet downhill from where it was last week.