BASEMENT DEBASEMENT

The Scientist gave me hell for not posting in a week… but man, I’ve been busy! And when I’m busy at work, I’m sorry to say that it's the Internet who suffers. Because writing at home? With the girls running around? Forget it.

I’m especially busy right now because I’m taking Thursday and Friday of this week off. A fun vacation getaway, you ask? Nope. We’re having the basement waterproofed, which will hopefully do away with our water problems forever.

We’re having one of those internal waterproofing systems installed. Basically, it works like this: a crew jackhammers a trough all around the inside of the basement walls, to a couple feet down. Then they lay perforated pipe, cover it with gravel, then re-cement overtop that. All this pipe runs to a sump pump, which will quietly chug away in the corner. The idea being that any water that tries to seep in from under the foundation (where our water has been coming from) hits the pipe first and is magically whisked away. Hey, here’s a photo of something similar.

Soooo… Thursday morning, bright and early, burly men with jackhammers are going to descend into my basement and, by all accounts, make an ungodly amount of noise. The guy who sold us the system said, “I’ll be honest with you, the first six hours are really rough.”

Speaking of which, here’s some unsolicited advice to sales guys worldwide: if you sell a product or service that isn’t widely known for it’s honest salesmen, like say, aluminum siding or basement waterproofing, it’s probably not the best approach to pepper your sales pitch with the phrase, “Well, I’ll be honest with you…”

Guy who sold us the system said that probably 12 times in the half hour we talked. I know it’s just a verbal tic, the equivalent to saying, “um” or “y’know” -- but it still bugged the hell out of me. Every time he said it I thought, “Oh, okay, now you’re being honest with me? Before, not so much?”

Anyway, I’ve been busting ass to get the basement cleaned up for the decimation that awaits it; moving boxes and shelves and various and sundry piles of crap away from the walls. I thought the basement was disorganized before, now it’s a disaster.

But, right now it’s dry. And after this weekend, it should stay that way.

I hope.

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