aggravation

Everybody that comes to see this house is very interested, seriously interested, I'm told. But all are concerned about the water we're currently pumping from our brand-new, spiffy, upgraded sump pumps. The sump pumps that I just spent $3,232 for. The sump pumps that are working flawlessly, silently, and powerfully, and doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing (keeping our basement dry).

Here's the thing: we live in an area dotted with springs and creeks and vernal ponds. Water doesn't drain into this area from anywhere else - it arises here. It's known as a seasonally high water table. So if there is ample snow in the areas that serve the local aquifer, come springtime that water finds its way here and the water table will rise along with the springs and creeks and vernal ponds. When I was buying this house in April 2002, the sumps were bone dry. It was the end of a five-year drought.

Our first summer here, we had a devastating thunder storm that lasted the better part of an evening. The winds and rain were frightening, and we took a lot of close lightning strikes. The neighbors lost a huge tree just to the south of their pool, split in half lengthwise by lightning. Our gutters here were full of rotted leaves, and looked as if they'd never been cleaned, and so they overflowed. We had some seepage along the front basement wall that evening. There are stains from that storm, though there were already marks on the wall, so that wasn't the first such event. We have kept the gutters clean since then and even in last summer's 13-inches-of-rain-in-one-afternoon, we didn't take in a drop, and the sumps were dry by that time, too.

Houses float on the hulls of their foundations in a sea of earth. When that earth becomes saturated, the force of water can crack basement floors and walls as it increases in volume. Sump pumps keep that from happening, and keep the pressure down enough so that there is no seepage through walls or up through the floors. In Illinois, our home was on a slope, and the pump emptied about 30 feet from the house, cutting a little channel toward our neighbors' property and seasonally flooding a bit of their lawn on the property line. Mary and I planted, together, a bog garden there, filled with gooseneck loosestrife and other wet-loving flowering plants. It was a beautiful spot, and a nice solution between neighbors. Plus, some of the plants we put in would have been invasive if not for the fact that the water was only in that one spot, so we could grow things that we wouldn't dare try in any other part of our gardens. Here is it:



Well, this little piece of paradise is flat, and I'll go further and say it's a poorly-graded building site. The classy work the plumbers did had to be amended by me and hobbitt in order to not just pump water right back through the basement window. So while it's not a lovely flexible black hose running across the south side of our yard, it's doing the job of keeping the basement dry while the water returns to the Pine Barrens, and creating a little bird bath out there to boot. I can understand why buyers would question it. Nothing I say will convince anyone we don't have a problem here. But I'm still really pissed off and aggravated that by improving something that never was a problem, we've made it look like there's a problem.