This Space for Rent

Happy New Year!

HappyNewYear

The house rings in the new year in the traditional fashion by having (a) the sewers clog up and (b) welcoming a torrent of water into the basement for our cleaning enjoyment.

Oy.

If a GIANT METEOR destroys our house and the house insurance includes GIANT METEOR coverage, the new house will not have a basement at all. It’s theoretically nice to have a nice insulated-by-clay part of the house, but the exchange for this is that we end up having a thick leaky concrete hull with all of the sewer pipes conveniently stowed on the wrong side of it.

The new house will have a pipe corridor with a hatchway, and then if something goes wrong down there the pipes will be on the same side of the concrete as the pipe repair (I could, of course, do this to the existing house, but that means I’d have to find 150 cubic yards of fill to backfill the existing basement plus replacement of a couple of century-old wooden pilings with something that wouldn’t rot immediately and end up collapsing the house into the pipe corridors. No, the prudent solution is to wait for the GIANT METEOR to come hurling down from on high.)

UPDATE: It’s 1:15am on Friday now, and no GIANT METEORS are in sight. Which is bad, because enough rain has been dumped onto our property so that water is starting to come up through cracks in the basement floor. And if we get more than 4 inches of water in the basement, it reaches the UPS and then *pfffft* no more network (and most likely no more computers, either. Ick.) And the NWS is saying it might *snow* tomorrow.

I guess I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.