The unpleasant side-effect of having a basement is …
... if your drainage isn't good, it will turn into a particularly nasty sort of interior swimming pool.
Our house is coming up on 100 years old, so when it was built the solution to drainage problems was to gutter the dickens out of the house and feed the water into the city sewage (aka "The Willamette River") system. Given the (clayey) soil that the house is built on, it may have been a good idea then, but it's not a good idea now; the underground drains have filled up, some of the gutters have been shingled over, and the house has, over the course of 96 rainy winters, been slowly inching down the hill towards Crystal Springs Creek. So, the landscaping that started out as
-------
| |
|house|
__ | |
--..-| |-.. east->
| | .
=-----= <- basement
Has become, due to the miracle of gravity
-------
| |
|house|
__ | |
--..._| |_.
|~~~~~| .
=-----= <- lap pool
And now the rain that used to flow away from the house is instead flowing up next to the house, percolating down besides the basement, forcing itself through cracks in the basement, and giving us our own lap pool!
It doesn't help that's it's been raining cats and dogs off and on for the last few weeks.
Sigh. At least there are solutions to this problem. "All" I have to do is dig a trench around the perimeter of the house, lay a drainage tile in a gravel bed, reshape the ground so that it slopes away from the house down to the drainage tile, then wait for the basement to dry so I can deal with the sewer pipes (we have a combined drain system for the house and detached garage; at some time in the past one of the big cherry trees in the backyard cracked the sewer line running from the garage to the house, which means that when it rains a lot the backyard becomes a puddle which drains into the convenient pipe, and then UP, along with whatever unspeakable filth is in the sewer pipe, into the basement.)
My workshop, conveniently, is in the basement. Along with the servers on my home network. Neither of these will be particularly happy when someone jackhammers up a large chunk of the basement floor to replace the no-doubt-disgusting sewer pipes.
*Sigh*
The 101 square meter small house (without a basement!) seems more and more appealing every time I think about it.