[AE.Personal] Bugs in the Basement
I often feel a little exposed talking about issues in my real life, because of my long experience both with people engaging in weird parasocial relationships with me and with trolls looking for any vulnerability to pounce on.
So as much as I talk about using this newsletter as a personal outlet and pseudo-blog, when it comes time to put words down on the screen and fling them out across the ether, I often clam up. I am working on that! I feel like it’s a matter of practice, of exercising the mental muscles used in communication.
So I mentioned last week that we have distractions around the house owing to both contractors coming by and the issues they’re coming to address. We had feared we might have foundation issues in our very old, very unfinished, very serial killer vibe-y basement as it has started flooding much more frequently.
We don’t keep anything in our basement, per se, so there’s no possessions or family heirlooms or holiday ornaments or whatever being damaged by the water, but we’ve had concerns about the water both heralding and exacerbating damage to the basement walls, and also the standing water in the summer easily becomes a breeding ground for both drain flies (a very large, very gross species of gnat) and common gnats.
Both gnat species are essentially harmless but it’s very unpleasant to have a house erupt with swarms of them. We’ve gotten very good at pest control, and very vigilant about controlling access to our sink and shower drains (where drain flies are wont to establish nests, hence the name). If anybody wants to hear product recommendations for insect control, I can throw out some affiliate links in a future update.
Anyway. It’s been a thing, is my point. Several things. At this point we have had a couple contractors come by. One was a Basement Guy who took some measurements, but he advised us that the actual problem looked to be an ancient and kind of messed-up drain pipe, so he advised we call a Drain Guy before we have him do anything about waterproofing. That’s on the docket for next week now.
In the meantime, we got our gutters cleaned for the first time in… a while, and the last thunderstorm we had (which was the evening after that) doesn’t seem to have created a resurgence in the bug population, so maybe it helped?
We’re still going to get the drain pipe addressed, because this is the second time since we’ve lived here that a contractor in the basement called in on another errand has mentioned it. The people who replaced our aging oil-burning furnace with natural gas a few winters back also said it looked sketchy to them and said we should probably do something about it, but as we’d just bought a new furnace we didn’t have any wiggle room to do so, and forgot about it until it came up again.
Our house is old enough that we may wind up having to pay for replacing a hundred year old sewer line, which won’t be cheap. The offhand number that our Basement Guy pulled out as an informal estimate, given the age of our house and the condition of the site, is one of those details that I would be hesitate to share simply because I can too easily imagine a troll plugging in Maryland to a calculator on a home improvement site and going, “Well, that’s many times the local average so she’s obviously making things up.”
But, the worst case scenario for a plumbing problem is likely to be cheaper and easier to fix than the worst case scenario for a foundation problem, which is what we were afraid we would have, and what we might well still have in the future if we can’t get the basement flooding under control.
Anyway. That’s some of what we’re dealing with here: bugs and contractors. Hasn’t exactly been calm, peaceful, or pleasant, but we’re managing, and we have reason to hope we’ll be done with it before too long.
I hope everybody else in summer climes is managing the heat as best as is possible, and everybody else everywhere else is managing whatever comes their way with similar ease.
I’ll let you know next week if the Drain Guys tell us anything different.