The Great Mud Pits and the Magic Rings

Five years ago I bought this house in hopes that someday I would be able to make some money off of it, that it would be a good investment over the long run and that in the meantime it would provide me with a roof over my head. That and that I did not want to move again - I hated moving.

Shortly after I signed my name on the dotted line I realized that I'd purchased a home with a wet scary spider basement in a mediocre neighborhood. The neighborhood was improving steadily as time passed but unfortunately the basement was just getting worse. When Nick moved in and saw the mess that I had made of the basement he was shocked: it was at this point a realm of what seemed at first glance like hundreds of standing pools of water much like the world described in the Magicians Nephew by C.S. Lewis, the world that with a magic ring you could jump from pool to pool, world to world, and experience something new.

We quickly started working on the basement. We patched holes, we chiseled out cracks and filled them in, everything was cleaned and etched, Drilock was applied, the basement was dry, then we waited for the rain to come. It came with a vengeance and the pools of water reappeared.

Our next step was to have dozens upon dozens of contractors come out to tell us what they would do if they owned this house. They came and they told and everyone had a different story. The most outrageous of all the plans started with knocking a huge hole in the basement wall and building a conveyor belt. His bid was about three thousand dollars more than any of the other bids. All of the bids however started with one suggestion - regrade the yard.

So we did. Or we tried to. We hired someone to come and regrade the yard, to put in a few swales and to remove the 70 years of dirt that had accumulated on the sides of the house and had built up over the siding and were causing some (in my hopes all) of the water to get into the basement. He came and starting digging and then he disappeared leaving his tractors and tools strewn around the yard. Our beautiful grass was gone and The Great Mud Pits appeared in its place. Our dogs were regaled to a tiny corner of the yard and mud began to rule our lives. For the next 3 weeks it rained almost daily and the the tractors sat. And sat. And sat.

After the sun came back into our lives the mud dried up leaving behind fossils of our former yard; remnants of grass pushing up through the cracks in the earth, parts of daffodils and tulip bulbs never to bloom again, and limbs of the four trees that had lost their battle against the dozer. The job still is looming over us and I'm in hopes that it will be done soon. I want to see what will become of our CS Lewis world in the basement and refuse to go downstairs again until the job is done. The truth is that I now want to move, I want to experience something new, but I don't have a magic ring to transport me into the next world, to the next house. For me, the magic ring will come when we have a dry basement and a buyer who really wants what I wanted: a good investment over the long run that in the meantime would provide them with a roof over their head.