With the the Great Flood apparently nigh here in the Northeast, now seems to be the perfect time to find out just how dry our basement is.
It isn’t.
Alright, it’s not like we’ve got buckets here and are bailing water out for fear of our very lives. But I still had a bit of panic on Saturday. While cleaning up some things before Jeff and Sara swung by to head out to see Pearl Jam (my 10th show – more on that later), I noticed a small puddle in the middle of the semi-finished portion down below. I looked around, and figured it must have been seeping in through a crack – but there wasn’t much water and I figured we could just keep an eye on it.
Unfortunately, when I showed it to Lisa, we found more dampness around the floor below one of the windows. That would be the window that I wisely stacked the many boxes of CDs under. Oh yeah, I am sooooo smart.
You’ve never seen someone tear apart cardboard so quickly. There was that sudden realization that all of my indie CDs – including many expensive, hard-to-find ones – as well as pretty much all of my favorite bands, were on the bottom. And the boxes were looking more and more soaked as I dug through them.
Amazingly, nothing appears to be damaged. It was a whole lot of dampness going on, but no soaking. I still had to setup some places to stack all of the CDs, since keeping them in the wet cardboard could not help at this point. Once that was finished – and I breathed a slight sigh of relief – I finally pulled out the dehumidifier Lisa’s Dad gave us and set it on extra dry. And it had been going full blast ever since. I empty it twice a day, and tonight it still managed to overflow (the automatic shutoff is broken). I have to admit that I’m really amazed at how dry it’s keeping the basement – there isn’t even a hint of dampness around the stacks of CDs.
Unfortunately, this victory does not change the fact that I must clean out the gutters ASAP!