This is the one about the time I went swimming in my basement

I've lived in my cute little house in my cool little college town for two years. The house was built in the '50s by a man and his new bride. It has hardwood floors, great kitchen cabinets, and plenty of space for two people. Despite the disturbing lack of electric sockets in most rooms, I really love the place. But with any old-ish house, things just start wearing out. When we first moved in, there was a flurry of maintenance calls since no one had lived in the house for a couple of years before us. The sump pump wasn't working properly in the basement, the pipes under the bathroom sink leaked, the gutters were clogged and created a pool of water on one side of the house that leaked into the basement, etc. But each time I called our landlord, someone in a truck with tools in hand was at our house practically before I hung up the phone. It's still like that after two years, and it is awesome how well we are treated as tenants.

One ongoing problem that we were able to mostly ignore until just a couple of days ago is that when the sump pump runs in the basement, water backs up into the kitchen sink. The pump is mainly only active when the washing machine empties into it, and so the kitchen sink only gets about half full for a few seconds before the water drains out, but it's kind of gross. And it's especially annoying when you're washing dishes. The pressure of the water backing up finally caused the pipes under the kitchen sink to leak all over the place, so I called the landlord. A maintenance man came while I was at work yesterday, and so I was all excited to do a load of laundry to test out the normal behavior of the pump. You will probably never hear me say I'm excited to do laundry again.

So I tossed in a load and skipped upstairs to do some dishes. The sump pump clicked on, and there was no back up. SUCCESS! But then after a while it seemed funny to me that I never heard the washing machine start the wash cycle. I peeked down the basement stairs and there was water everywhere. I have no idea why the washing machine never registered the water level as being full, but it kept on filling, for what I guess was 20 or 30 minutes, and the sump pump had never actually clicked on. I must've heard the furnace or some other noise and thought it was working. Can you see where this is going? The original problem was water backing up into the kitchen sink. I popped on my rain boots and waded into the water--a good six inches of water--and jiggled the syphon pipe. The pump kicked on and as it sucked water up and out, the kitchen sink about exploded. Water started seeping through the ceiling from the kitchen above, and seeping turned into pouring, and long story ended, there are maintenance men at my house cutting pipes open and fixing me a new sump pump.

Some might say that I am wasting money by paying rent instead of buying a house, but today, as I bask in the comfort of knowing skilled people are fixing major problems at my house for free, I'll just think of the monthly expense as affordable on-call maintenance. And it was actually pretty funny to see the cats' total disdain for the moat that was created around the stairs.