Basement Leak at Verb's House!

Having had a basement disaster, I would recommend a "Leakfrog" or similar water alarm. It would have saved me two pretty expensive replacement bills if I had them. I lived in my house from 1982 until 2015 without a single water issue. Suddenly, I had two of them within 6 months. The first one was when I suddenly had a couple of inches of water after a big storm, ruining my floorstanding speakers. I decided not to claim insurance on the damage, as the $1000 deductible was almost what the speakers were worth. After the problem was supposedly solved (a downspout had clogged up), I bought some new speakers and thought all was well. One day I woke up and the house seemed to be very humid. It was winter and some of my windows were sweating. Uh oh. I went downstairs and the water heater had blown open and there was about an inch of water on the floor and another pair of ruined speakers. I decided not to replace them this time and after checking everything out hired an expert who found out the water heater wasn't the only problem, as water had come down the wall again too. Finally it was resolved, the downspouts needed to be extended and adjusted to get the water away from the house. I moved all my surviving equipment upstairs and soon sold the house. He reports no more water.

A neighbor wasn't so lucky. One night, I was walking my dog as I often did, and as I passed their house, I heard an odd "Urrrrrrrrrkkk!" noise. My dog kept looking at the house, cocking his head. Just then, their lights came on, and they started running around. Their water inlet pipe had developed a leak, and it had started to collapse the basement wall, a cinder block type, unlike my house, which had a poured concrete foundation. The noise was the big picture window being squeezed as the basement wall began to fail. He came out and told me what was going on, and that he had called a local place that did the type of work needed to fix it. They began to arrive about 4am, the picture window had shattered, and the outside brick wall had started coming apart. It cost many thousands of dollars to fix and they had to dig up the foundation to repair it as it had actually been damaged over the entire front of the house. Drywall and piping had to be replaced and it was a huge mess. They did a great job and the house looks perfect, but wow, it sure happened in a hurry, and was expensive, like 1/3rd the value of the house.

As I’m just finishing remodeling the basement, this thread gives me anxiety...

Timing is everything. I've seen all kinds of crazy stuff, being up all night most of my life. If I ruled the world, dawn would be bedtime. Just the animals I've literally run into over the years is kind of amazing. I lived before, and do now, places with forest really close by, making my old backyard and my apartment complex a natural pathway for deer, coyotes, cranes, a pack of seagulls in back of the building I worked at and about everything else that lives in NW Ohio, including a very large rooster that had the most amazing brown black and white color scheme that allowed him to disappear into the brush as soon as he stopped moving. He was gone the next morning, never to return. One of the scariest things I saw was a neighbor we called, "The Zombie Woman" as she always wore sunglasses and walked like one of the zombies from "Night of the Living Dead". About 2am, Gus and I were walking by and saw her naked in her living room. A zombie wouldn't have been as scary. I've seen some stuff I bet would get me banned if I posted about them here. A couple of things were truly horrifying, I can't ever unsee them!

Dude, I was just there like a few weeks ago. We should have hooked up at Fat Tony's downtown.

Like fat Tony's Little Weiner Emporium?

verb wrote: »

Now I’m getting anxiety!

Tony M wrote: »

Yea, night time does bring out the wildlife. I live right in the heart of Wilm. NC.. Right in middle of a BUSY City! I've been awake a lot of nights and have looked out to see what's roaming every night. Raccoon families, Possum families and even a Red Fox one night. That was cool! No deer though. We still have wild rabbits. One ran across the road, one house down from me when I was talking to my neighbor around 5:00PM on Sat.. He spotted it and I turned and saw it also. I get them in this fiels behind my yard that I keep mowed for the past 28 years. It's really nice!

There's cats that run loose around here so that rabbit and any others are in a danger zone for sure! These cats aren't feral, just neighbors that let their spayed or neutered cats out alot.

One racoon family one year, around 9:00PM or so,( in the dark) would come up to our back porch glass and put their little hands up to the glass and do high fives with my wife and step-daughter. They wanted more Ritz crackers.LOL.

We had previously thrown out old Ritz crackers to them in this area if we saw them. My wife quickly got scared after about a week that they were becoming too friendly , so we stopped tossing Ritz crackers out to them and they left for good. But it was cool.

It's been told; go to a walmart at night and see the humanity (?) that live among us that most of us never see.

We have everything you have, plus the deer, thousands of rabbits(not exaggerating), and hundreds of skunks, and squirrels, lots of those. The area I recently moved out of is locally famous for it's insane number of skunks. We have lots of feral cats that like to hang out with skunks. About 20 years ago, my mother began feeding feral cats whose numbers went from 2 or 3 to about 20 very quickly. She had a lot of physical issues that made walking pretty difficult. One evening, she went out on the porch to feed her pack, opened the window, and along with the "other" cats that instantly appeared was one that didn't quite fit in. I was looking out the window of my bedroom, and saw the skunk, and was about to warn her when she realized what it was. I hadn't seen her move that fast in many years.

I put up a game camera soon after they got cheap and was amazed at the number and variety of animals that passed through my yard every night. My dog King was pretty much uninterested in hunting the animals that came into the yard, with two exceptions, he would hunt moles and mice, and loved to snack on the Cicadas that climbed up on the trees to pop out of their shells and dry their wings before flying away. He probably ate thousands of them. His larger prey kill count consisted of one skunk. His littermate, Molly was a nervous wreck of a dog inside the house, living with a super dominant dog like King probably didn't help. But outside, she was the boss, and a killing machine. Possums, groundhogs, a rat, lots of skunks, a beaver (not a scratch on her), and one epic showdown with a big raccoon showed her to have some impressive skills. She was stopped before she killed it, but her attack on it was impressive to watch. One of her tactics was picking it up and throwing it into a tree. I thought, "Wow, lucky move", and then she did it again. When it was clear that she was about to finish the coon off, the next door neighbor's son grabbed her tail, allowing me to get her and drag her into the house. At her peak, about the time she killed the beaver, which was kind of rough to watch and hear, she could kill a possum in about 15 seconds, ripping it's throat out. I never had even seen a beaver within about 12 miles of my house before I went out in the yard to see what was going on. It was pretty thick with shrubs in the back and I could hear her snarling, and I could tell it was "Molly is killing something again!". She had the beaver, which I would guess was about 35 pounds or so, pinned on it's back, and she was finishing it off. I tossed the corpse over the fence on the river side of my yard, and something drug it off, as usual for one of Molly's many victims. A couple of times a year, her killing would get her into trouble, as she would get some confidence during the kill and deciding to challenge King for boss. It always went very badly for her as King was perfectly named and if anything angered him, it was being challenged as boss dog. He was ALWAYS boss dog. King and Molly as 6 month old pups:

Tony M wrote: »

My neighbor loves that breed. He's owned 2 or 3 in the 30 years I've known him

That was FUN to read! Amazing killer skills for sure. Those wild critters have some TEETH and CLAWS that are vicious. Especially the possums! Raccoons are equipped with some fangs and claws too. Man, a beaver, WOW.. that beaver must've been bigger than Molly. LOL.

Is that breed known for their hunting and killing skills?

I've thought about buying a trail cam in the past but it's slipped my mind for 10 years. I think I'll try to get one asap.

Thousands of rabbits huh? They're a bit more proficient than cats aren't they.

We had a cat once that got pregnant one time. We had 13 cats and kittens. The momma had babies and then the babies had babies. We got her fixed after her first litter but we weren't expecting one of her daughters to get pregnant sooo fast! Those were some crazy days. They would bring dead mice to our back steps all the time.

They weren't any breed just 55 pound mutts. Mom was a Lab/Doberman mix and dad was probably the Husky mix next door. You probably thought they were Border Collies, a lot of people did.
Here is a pic of King, Molly and some of their 11 siblings:


They met up with at least 10 of them over the years. Some looked like King and Molly, some looked very Husky like, and the one in the pic above looked very German Shepherd like. They were a lot different temperment than BC's usually are. Molly was kind of obsessed with the back yard critter control, but King slept so much as a pup we thought there had to be something wrong with him. When he wasn't sleeping, he was pretty much a wall bouncing lunatic. King did have one thing he was obsessed with, killing mice inside the house, and eating them. We lived near several old buildings that were full of mice and other animals that were torn down over some period of years. and with each one, a flood of mice would hit the neighborhood, and King got going. If I saw a mouse or any "evidence" of one, I would just say, "King! Mouse!", and he would go into search and kill mode. He would crash into closet doors if he thought a mouse was inside, and he was almost always right. He wouldn't sleep, and he really liked his sleep, until the mice were gone. Molly didn't give a crap about the mice, that was King's job and he took it very seriously.. We would hear him crashing into closets in the middle of the night to score a mouse. Once in a while, he would bring me a still living, but close to dead from shock mouse and spit it out into my hand. I would usually yell and drop it. It would be gone down his throat a second later. Somehow, we had him checked for worms, etc, annually because of his mouse eating, and he never had them.

Just for grins last year, I counted how many squirrels I saw coming home from work in the morning, and how many rabbits I saw at night going to work. Road kills counted. The average over 5 days was 137 squirrels, and 42 rabbits per day. One day I saw over 200 squirrels on a 20 minute drive with 50 of them being in one park along the way. Obviously, there were a lot more rabbits I never saw due to it being dark. I didn't divide the black and red/gray squirrels. I never saw a black squirrel until last year around here. Suddenly I started seeing them all over.

One of the things that surprised us when I had the trail cam up was how many packs of dogs went through the area. Since I walked King (Molly was NOT pleasant to walk at all) all over the area, I thought it was odd that I never saw any of those dogs on our walks.

I miss having dogs, but due to my injuries 10 years ago and bad back, I can't walk them, so I have cats now. They are great, but not the same. I have a couple of friends with a lot of dogs, so I can get my dog fix taken care of when I feel like it. One friend has 4 dogs, one of them is the dog I was thinking about taking before I decided it wouldn't be fair was Jake, a Pit Mix. It's actually the smallest of the four dogs, the largest being an almost 200 pound Boerbel and Lab? mix that they found near death along a road. $4000 plus later, he came home as a 7 week old pup who is now almost two. He loves me big time, but a lot of people are scared of him, as he stares at people, especially ones he doesn't know, and demands, with a swipe of his foot and a "Uhhh!" his chin rubbed. King was the same way, he would growl at you if you stopped the chin rubbing too soon. It scared some people, but it was just a way of letting you know you weren't allowed to stop yet. If you didn't start rubbing his chin again, he would then stare at you and woodpecker you in the chest while growling. If that didn't work, he would leave in a huff, and sit on the couch or chair and sigh, while looking at you in disgust. Not disgusted here, just relaxing in mom's chair.