So, it’s spring. The ground seems to think otherwise, however, since it’s still hiding under much of the snow that fell over the past four months. Altogether, it’s been an impressive winter here, with ice and snow that fell and never went away.
I am hoping for a rather gradual thaw, though. I’m in no hurry to see the mess of my yard, nor am I particularly in a hurry to mow the lawn. But the main reason I don’t want the snow to melt quickly is my basement.

This house has a half-finished basement. That is, one side has flooring and a ceiling and drywall walls, while the other has a concrete floor and no ceiling. I set up my workshop in the unfinished end and use the other end as a rec-room , although currently I have a massive pile of stuff stored down there while I rearrange the main floor of the house.
Needless to say, I don’t want any water down there.
In the spring of the year I first moved in here, a heavy rainfall melted the majority of the snow. Unfortunately, I discovered that over an inch of water ended up in the basement. Luckily, the floor down there is not level; it slopes from one end of the house to the other. All the water was in the workshop end of the basement. Also lucky was the fact that I did not at that time have much in there.
Anyway, I dedicated a day to cleaning it up. I thought very seriously about getting a sump pump and chopping a hole in the floor. I decided to try my luck without one.

Once, a friend of mine needed help to move his mother’s upright piano down to his basement, which was his main storage area for everything he wanted to keep but never see (most people around here seem to use their garage for that). So, after a few hours of joking around, we finally wrestled the piano down the narrow stairs. We set it up against a wall. My guess is he promptly forgot about it.
He remembered at some point, though. I was passing by his house and saw the piano, along with a lot of other stuff, standing out on the side of the road. It looked fairly tragic, since it was raining. When I asked him what had happened, he said the cold water pipe in his bathroom vanity sprung a leak and water ran down through the hole in the cabinet and straight into the basement. No water ended up on the bathroom floor at all, so he didn’t notice until he went to the basement to get something and his foot landed in a couple of inches of water.
The piano was directly under the bathroom, of course.

He bemoaned the loss of his collection of Archie comic books most, though. I don’t know what else was down there, but it resulted in him cleaning his basement.
I have pipes all through my floor. This house is heated by baseboard radiators and the pipes are the same age as the house. I fully expect one of those to break (I’ve already broken one joint in a heater by moving it just enough to get engineered wood flooring under it). Of course, there are also the water lines for hot and cold water, and some of those have been nicely butchered over the years. But my main fear about water is spring.
So, I recently spent a day rearranging my workshop. The goal was to get everything I could off the floor. The result is the workshop is not in a usable state at the moment, since a lot of the stuff that was on the floor had to be stacked up on the bench and tablesaw. I currently have over three feet of wood piled on the bench. I have no idea how much weight that is.
It has rained a bit, but the basement is dry so far.

I gamble every year with the possibility of flooding. But the fact is, there was no indication that there had been any flooding whatsoever prior to my moving in here, The drywall extends to the floor of the basement (it shouldn’t) and there was no indication it ever wicked water. The finished side has carpet directly on the concrete (something else that shouldn’t be done) but there’s no musty smell. Overall, it’s pretty dry down there. So I firmly believe that the first spring was an anomaly and that it won’t happen again.
Or I believe that with my fingers crossed.