Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
When Roland first had his house built in the 1993, he knew not to have the basement finished. He spent the first few periods of wet weather sealing up the basement. This was mostly successful, with the exception of one corner, which always got a little damp. The basement had no sump pump, but a good gravel field and drain under the floor that worked well.
Shortly before we moved from Brookline to Seattle, a tree fell, quite close to the house (but fortunately, not on the house). It hit a large rock, and drove that rock deeper into the earth, compressing the pipe that drained the gravel under the basement. But we didn't know that then.
During our first visit back to Brookline, in October of 2005, when Teddy was a little over two months old, there was a substantial rainstorm. The basement got a couple of inches of water. Because it had never done that before, we had no sump pump, or even a floor pump. Roland attempted to empty the water with the ShopVac, which failed, other than to get him a helluva cold from the stress of wandering around barefoot in cold water for hours. The first pump we bought did not work, and proved difficult to return (a friend helped us out, returning it after we left). The second pump did work, but left us with a fraction of an inch of water which the dehumidifier had to deal with. We got a new dehumidifier.
On Mother's Day of 2006, there was a big storm. This time, the water got deep enough to damage the water heater and break the (new! Duet!) washing machine (the dryer was fine). I'll just note here that we use cloth diapers. It had also wet some cardboard, which was now growing something funky. Fortunately, there wasn't anything particularly valuable stored on the floor. The wine was okay, other than some damage to labels.
Roland checked the drain that got water from the gravel under the basement floor. It was trickling. We called a plumber and he installed a sump pump. This got water down to an inch below the basement floor. After it was installed, we discovered that the dehumidifiers in the basement had been drying it out from water other than the two incidents we knew about. We learned this when our electricity bill dropped substantially.
Several months later, we'd moved back to Brookline. After we'd been there a couple of months (the water heater had been replaced and the washing machine repaired), we were desperately tring to wedge all of our belongings into our limited space. It actually wasn't that limited. As anyone who has spent time in New England knows, no one here has just a house. There are always outbuildings, in our case the barn/garage, a shed (which stores what used to be stored in the other bay of the garage before I moved in). Upstairs in the barn is a woodshop and tire storage and some empty boxes. The barn and shed are sufficiently unheated to have solid ice on the floor of them during the winter. They are also in no way pest proof. The temperature and pest potential both limit what can safely be stored in them.
The basement, unlike the barn and the shed, has a temperature relatively close to that of the house, just a little bit cooler. With the sump (and a generator, to give us confidence we could run that sump even in a power outage), we were willing to risk storing stuff down there. Roland started buying shelving from Costco and plastic bins. Then one day, he got to thinking about that trickle out the drain. He went exploring with a chain saw and a shovel, discovered the problem, removed the offending section of pipe, and watched water gush out with enough force to fountain into the air. The water in the basement went from an inch below the floor to six inches below the floor in less than 12 hours.
Having lived through this experience, I have a few comments. First, do not finish your basement, nor buy a place with a finished basement. If it isn't finished, it's a lot easier to figure out where the water problems are and address them directly. Further, while this was unpleasant, we did not lose any living space. Had we, say, been sleeping down there, life would have been a whole lot worse. Second, sump pumps can really save your butt. Have one. Third, if you are using a sump pump regularly, something else is wrong. Persist, money, time and other resources permitting. If you can figure out what it is and fix it, gravity will once again take your water away, which is cheaper than a sump. Fourth, humidifiers help, and they too can save your butt. If you are relying on one to regularly dry out your basement, get that sump. It'll save you money and buy you time to figure out the real problem.
But most importantly, do not store anything on the floor of your basement; stuff should be at least six inches off the floor, or above high water mark, or whatever metric you are comfortable with. Cardboard is not great storage material for a number of reasons (it falls apart, molds, mildews and is nested in). Plastic, metal, glass and wood are all better.
Oh, and all those horror movies of people going down into a dark basement not knowing what they are going to find? Metaphors for this experience, or something like it.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created November 12, 2006 Updated February 20, 2007