Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’, I was lyin’ in bed wond’rin’ if the basement had changed at all (all apologies to Bob Dylan). I hadn’t been down there in a week or two. It’s not a finished basement, so all we really have down there is a hot water heater, the furnace, and cables that run underneath our floor. The house used to have an air conditioning unit down there, but the junkies living there, the ones the bank foreclosed on before we bought the house, took off with the unit so they could sell it for scrap metal, or so our neighbor Isaac tells us. We could tell it had been ripped out, and the junkie explanation sounds as good as any other.

Anyway, I figured I should go check on the basement just out of principle, to be a good homeowner and all. We’re first-time homeowners, moved in the crazy icy weekend after Christmas, so we’re trying to do this right.

I brushed snow and ice off the padlock, unlocked it and removed the chain, then opened up the cellar-style doors and ambled down the wooden steps. Our basement lies behind one more wooden door at the bottom of the stairs, so I nudged that open and squinted into the darkness. Something sure didn’t smell right. The basement bulb doesn’t have an on/off switch, so we generally just walk to it in the middle of the basement, then screw it in so it comes on. A little light does get in through some small thickly-paned windows and of course from the doorway, and it’s good thing, because I saw the standing water before I would have stepped in it. The word that leaped from my mouth next proved to be prophetic, because sure enough there was plenty of what that word stands for lying amidst the water.

After a consultation with a city sanitation worker who informed me that it wasn’t a city sedwer problem and a plumber who wouldn’t work on it until the water was almost gone, I headed to our local home improvement mega-store to go find something called a “sump pump.” I wasn’t sure how much it would be, but took a 10% off coupon I’d scored from one of those Change-of-Address packets the post office gives out. I left the store with the aforementioned sump pump, 50 feet of black pump hose, and some disposable latex gloves. My father-in-law advised me to go buy some high water proof boots, too, which I picked up at a tractor supply store nearby.

I spent the afternoon learning how to use the sump pump, wading through (insert your favorite euphemism here), adjusting and readjusting the pump so it would actually work, calling upstairs to ask Stacey to plug the extension cord in so I could see if it would run right yet, and then keeping an eye on the flow of dark yellow fluid out from the basement and into the yard.

The plumber (one called on a family recommendation) decided not to come back that afternoon or evening – he said something about it being too cold or freezing or something. I showered at Stacey’s cousin’s apartment in our same little city that night (thanks Chelse!) and felt my toes and fingers for the first time in hours. Back at our place, we still couldn’t release any water down the pipes for fear of flooding the basement. When the plumber finally answered my calls late in the afternoon the next day, after I’d pumped the basement out yet again, he informed me that he’d been out to another call and broken his equipment, so it would be a few days before he could get out.

One more night of no flushing, no letting the drain out. Dishes were stacking up, sinks held two days’ worth of teeth-brushing. I’m just glad we have two bathrooms. Another family-recommended plumber got to us the next day, though, and found that he had to remove our first floor toilet and roto-root through that rather than the basement. He found rags and tree roots all tangled up with the sewage down there, all of it blocking our pipes. We don’t really want to speculate why rags had been put down the pipes. Our neighbor Isaac would say it has something to do with drugs.

[[p.s. I’ll save you the pleasure of reading about Phase II, but believe me, this post’s title still applies.]]