the joys of home ownership

We’ve been our house for a little over a year now. It’s our second house. The first one was an older three-bedroom, brick house. It had lots of charm: hardwood floors, old wood windows, six-panel solid-wood doors, and radiator heat. The kitchen and bathroom had been remodeled before we moved in. We lived there happily for nearly five years.

When my wife got pregnant, we knew the house was going to quickly become too small. The driveway barely allowed enough space for us to get in and out of our Liberty, so we knew getting a baby in and out would be nearly impossible. The yard was small. The street was busy and sloped and cobblestone. And we hated our neighbors.

Additionally, the old wood windows were drafty. It was impossible to pull a car into the garage. The basement was unfinished and we knew that eventually, having only three bedrooms and one bath was going to be tough on our future family. We also wanted to move closer to our parents so that they’d be closer to the baby. We only lived 5 miles from where we grew up, but the drive could take as much as 30 minutes.

We searched for and found the perfect house. It was a four-bedroom, 2 ½ bath brick house on a cul-de-sac. The driveway was two cars wide and the garage was useable. It needed some updates (we knew we would miss our more modernized kitchen and bath), but it had a lot going for it. Or so we thought.

We moved in on December 30, 2003. Because I work for a financial institution, I had to work on Saturday, January 3, 2004. On that day, Pittsburgh received an unusual amount of rain. Had it snowed, we might have been okay. But it didn’t. It rained. Buckets.

My wife and I were in the finished basement of our new home unpacking photographs. I looked down at the box I was unpacking and the carpet around it looked darker. I thought maybe the shadows were playing tricks on me at first. Then I stood up from the couch I had been sitting on. Instantly, my feet we soaked. I grabbed the box and moved it to higher ground. Then we moved the couch away from the wall and noticed that the carpet was floating. The basement began flooding.

The previous owners had lived in the house for 46 years. The basement had never flooded in that time. Or so they say. Since that day in early 2004, we’ve had water in our basement 7 or 8 times. In the last year and three months. Pretty incredible odds. I should play the lottery. Or maybe not. I didn’t win anything in Vegas.

Our flooding has never been all that bad. I’ve seen people on the news who have water on their first floor. We usually only get water about an inch deep and it eventually makes its way down the drain in the laundry room. It still sucks. Now that spring is coming, the basement stinks. You can smell it when you come in the front door. We keep candles burning to remedy that issue.

I went through a phase where I hated the house and just wanted to move. However, in that same year and three months, we have remodeled the kitchen (it is beautiful), removed carpeting in four rooms to reveal the hardwood floors (five if you include the basement, which isn’t really finished anymore and is concrete under the carpet), and painted those four rooms.

Our daughter’s nursery is one of the rooms we repainted. My wife’s aunt painted the most beautiful mural of a meadow and a pond for the room, with clouds on the ceiling and a tree in the corner. The tree’s trunk is actually a small shelf my wife’s uncle made. And I refinished the hardwood floor in there. The floor looks great and I want to redo the floors in the other two upstairs bedrooms too. Next on the list though is the bathroom upstairs. It is the ugliest shade of pink I’ve ever seen, complete with a pink bathtub.

I’ve learned a lot in that time too. I’ve learned that although we were honest on our disclosure, the previous owners (a seemingly sweet older couple) were not. I’ve also learned that homeowner’s insurance will cover a stopped up toilet, but not groundwater that leaks through the foundation (stupid people are rewarded, but acts of God are your responsibility). I’ve also learned you can’t get flood insurance if you aren’t in a flood plain.
More importantly though, I’ve learned that you can’t stop Mother Nature. This spring, I want to dig down to the foundation to see if I can’t do something to stop the water from coming in. I have also learned that there are more important things in life than a leaky basement. I’ve been learning that for nearly ten months now.