Archive for January 6th, 2005

Well I didn’t expect a leak there.

Thursday, January 6th, 2005

The basement has two enclosed storage rooms in the front part of it: One is under the front steps, and the other is under the sun room. Both are brick walled with a concrete ceiling, although the one under the stairs has a slanted ceiling and is considerably colder since the stairs are exposed to the elements.

We decided to use the room under the sun room–the bigger of the two–to store dry goods and supplies, while using the smaller, damper, cooler room to store empty boxes, Christmas decorations, wine, and the like.

I thought I’d be clever and put the boxes on a platform out of old milk crates and boards to prevent them from getting water damaged should the basement ever flood. I even went so far as to set the boxes away from the walls too in case the walls should leak. So we’ve got space for water to flood or leak, and plenty of room for air to circulate to prevent things from getting funky.

I did not, however, notice the 3/32″ crack at the back of the top step of the front stairs.

Nor did I plan for the ceiling to leak.

Furthermore, I didn’t think that the melting snow we left on the front steps after the snowstorm would melt and leak all the way through into the storage room.

So imagine my surprise when I went in there to get the boxes for taking down the Christmas decorations and discovered that some of them were wet. Once we figured out what was going on, we pulled the rest of the boxes out of the room, along with a bag of tarps that would have been a lot more useful on top of the boxes.

So once again, we’ve got a basement full of boxes

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