The day is looking gorgeous and the weather forecast confirms it. Tomorrow is supposed to be equally as nice.

When we bought this house 41 years ago, we thought we had a really nice unfinished basement we could finish and use. Were we ever surprised when we discovered that it leaked when it rained and when it stormed it flooded. It took us a number of years and some very serious digging to cure the water problem. We dug along the side of the foundation to the bottom of the foundation to lay in layers of sand and gravel. We laid drain tile on that and took it out to the street to drain there. Before we put in the drain tile, we planned to waterproof the outside of the foundation with a tar like substance and heavy weight polyethylene. In the bottom of the trench he dug, Roger discovered rolls of the polyethylene the builder was supposed to put on the outside of the foundation as we were then doing ourselves. Needless to say in all the previous years, the foundation had no waterproofing. No wonder water would leak into the basement. Our soil is heavy clay; when it becomes saturated, there is only one place for the water to go - - - into the basements.

Inside we dug and constructed two dry wells into which we can channel water from the drain tiles if we have a very heavy rainfall. With our little pumps, we can pump out the water that collects in the dry wells. When we were implementing this waterproofing and anti-flood program, we dug another dry well into the front yard. We dug a hole large enough to hold a 50 gallon commercial polyethylene drum. Its top is a couple feet below the soil surface and we have access to it so that if necessary we can drop in a pump to take out the water. The drain tiles take the water into the drum at its top; the water continues its journey via more drain tiles from the bottom of the drum. Fortunately for us, we have a natural slope from back to front. We also extended the drain tiles into the back.

The summers that we did this work, Roger dug holes and channels in the yard. He could stand upright in some of them and the top of his head would just barely show. In others, only his top half showed when he stood up. Immediate neighbors, people living in the area who passed by, and our friends all wondered what we were doing. Some we told that it was a foxhole.

As I describe our anti-water program, it really sounds like we have gone to extremes. I cannot tell you how many times the basement flooded before this. It has now been a number of years; we have had to pump water out of the indoor dry wells but we have not had water in the basement, not even once. But the memory of water in the basement continues to linger. We continue to thinking, "What if. . . ? " I think this is causing us to drag our feet on the finishing projects for the basement. Now we are beginning to think, "What if a chipmunk gets in after we have finished the basement?"