A message to some new readers

Dear Sir or Madam:

I was interested to see that you arrived at my site yesterday after using Google to search for "should I buy a house if the basement gets a little wet." I backtracked the search and found the page in my blog where you entered, and it was fun to read stuff I wrote a year ago and haven't really looked at since. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

And the answer is, "hell, no - there's no such thing as 'a little wet.'"

Just ask our former next-door neighbors, who are busy trying to dry out their 'a little wet' finished basement for the second time in three years, thanks to two freak sump pump failures and some wacky global warming weather. I think the rain hit Tuesday, and yesterday afternoon the carpet was still so wet it would soak through your socks almost immediately, and let me tell you, it smells funky down there. Their next-door neighbors had the carpet in their finished basement floating on top of the water, and they've seen barely a trickle in past storms.

When it comes to wet basements, my advice is to run away, far, far away. Barring that, buy lots of plastic totes, and assume that anything that goes in the basement will end up ruined at some point.

Thanks again for visiting, and I hope you stick around! The waterproofing on the basement in our current house is sure to fail at some point, and you wouldn't want to miss that, would you?

- the management

PS - to the person who ended up here after searching for "ground ivy eradication in lawns," you have my condolences. My advice: move. Clears the problem right up, as long as you check the new house's lawn before you close.