March Madness

March has been a bit nuts for us, chock-full of a lot of running around and not enough relaxing. The biggest contributor to the craziness has been the amount of travel that both Gabe and I have had. Gabe started off March in Louisville, Kentucky for a couple of days; had a weekend in Vegas for a friend’s bachelor party; flew directly from Vegas to Santa Barbara for a day; flew to Sacramento for another day; came home. Once Gabe returned home, I flew to Vegas for five days to work at a client’s user conference. Then it was Easter. Now Gabe is gone again to Anaheim and San Diego, returning on Friday. While this amount of traveling may be normal for some families, I don’t like it. I’m more of a homebody type. The good news is that I believe that most of my travel is done for the year. Gabe, on the other hand, will always have as much travel available to him as he is willing to take. Funny how traveling becomes less fun the more you need to do it.

Gabe was also busy this month taking two classes which he finished with his last final yesterday. Just four more classes to go until he has his MBA. Yahoo!

In addition to traveling and studying, we’re also in the process of demolishing our basement. Well, let's be clear -- Gabe's brothers Cole and C.J. began the process of demolishing our basement. While Gabe and I have been running around like crazy people, his great brothers have come over to help us get going on some of our house projects. So very nice of them.

While we had in mind to tear out the basement and sheetrock it, we had a new issue pop up when things started to thaw around here a couple weeks ago. A wet spot appeared on the carpet. We were actually hoping that the cats were beginning to pee on the carpet, but no. It was some sort of basement water issue. Our goal is to someday (soon, hopefully) have our basement be this awesome recreation room good for movies, playing and lounging; however, this sort of usage requires a dry place so as not to wreck everything in the basement. So, we called a basement guy from Complete Basement Systems to give us an estimate on what it would cost to get a dry basement.

According to this guy, it will cost a lot. About $10,000. Ahem.

The $10,000 includes digging a drainage trench around the perimeter of the basement, putting in gravel and something that looks like rain gutter in said trench, re-cementing it. It also includes a wall vapor-lock system that will keep moisture from wicking through the walls and directing that moisture into the new trench. It also includes a sump pump and a drainage system into the front yard. And, it includes digging a trench down the middle of the basement floor to capture any water that may be leaking in through the seams of the house beams and the cement foundation.

All we need to do is completely demo the basement—which we are already in the process of doing. What we weren’t planning to do, though, is dig out the finished bathroom that is down there. Because the bathroom is on an external wall, we would have to completely rip out the bathroom, including shower, for the trenching to happen. Yet another expense.

Our next steps are to get a couple more estimates and see where things shake out. We really want to ensure we are fixing the basement infrastructure up right so we never (well, hopefully never) have to have water be an issue down there again. However, what does “right” look like? A full system with trenches and vapor lock walls and a sump pump? Or is it the $169 sump pump that was advertised at Menards that we bring home, jackhammer a hole, stick the sump pump in it, call it good and hope and pray everything will work? I’m guessing it’s somewhere in the middle, but not quite sure what the answer is yet. If you have any ideas, let us know.

And I can’t believe I just wrote on forever about sump pumps and basements.