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Basement Water Damage

Coping with Basement Water Damage

For many years we lived in a home with a basement that flooded when there was too much rain, mainly because city storm sewers were inadequate to take care of the run-off. The first time we discovered this problem was when my son was just a week old, and my husband came and woke me one morning to tell me we had a flood. He wasn't kidding. We probably had 4 feet of water in our finished basement, and we worried about not only pumping the water out, but also what preventive measures we could take to avoid future water damage and protect the things in our basement.

For the most part, we were lucky. Most of the walls were poured concrete and suffered little damage. However, there was a bedroom down there, and all the paneling buckled and had to be removed. Since we had only moved in the previous fall, half of everything we owned was sitting down on the basement floor. The majority was not salvageable, especially my library of books still in their moving boxes. Our neighbor, who owned a garbage service, backed his truck up to our house, and we just kept throwing things in.

We brought in fans and dried the place out thoroughly. However, the rubber-backed carpeting, which was almost new, was sure to contain mold spores, and it needed to be replaced. The furnace miraculously survived as did our antique food freezer. Still, there was so much damage that we knew we never wanted this to happen again. Everything dried up, we were busy, and we basically forgot about a permanent fix for our flooding problem. It was 11 years before it happened again, and once more it caught us off guard.

This time we not only threw out possessions, such as our pool table which deteriorated and crashed to the floor, but we also had a plumber come in, dig a pit in our basement floor, and put in a pumping system that was supposed to alleviate future water problems. We were almost to the point when we wanted to sell our home, and we hoped to get the maximum dollar in resale value. In addition, we wanted potential buyers to feel confident in purchasing the property. The pumping system was over $2,000, but it was well worth the mess and the cost.

Having basement water damage in your home is one of the worst things that can happen to a homeowner. It causes thousands of dollars worth of damage, and it could be worse if it caused structural damage in your home. Buying flood insurance is one safeguard you can take. Make sure to take pictures of your basement in its normal state; then, if it floods, take more pictures of the flooding and the damage it caused. That way you have proof for your insurance company or to turn in a claim to the federal government (FEMA).