To keep this as short as possible, I'll spare you all the times we noticed we had a damp to soaked carpet in the basement. It flooded 4 times with as much as 8" of water in the entire basement. This is a very bad situation for anyone, but I have musical instruments and equipment, as well as the usual, washer, dryer, furnace, water heater, etc., that could have been ruined any one of those 4 times.

After the first major flood, we had a sump pump installed... ... ...poorly. It wasn't connected well (properly). It was installed to pump water up hill, instead of downhill away from our house. It had a one-way valve in the pipe to keep the water from running back into the house. After a couple years the connection came apart in a rain storm. That would be the second time it really flooded. The third time something got stuck under the float switch and kept the pump running until it burned out. The fourth and final straw was a time we went to the coast and the power went out. We came home to a good 8" in the basement.

We spent the next few months talking with contractors who all had halfcocked ideas on what to do, all of which relied on a sump pump, which we'd found to be less than reliable. When the house was new, you can bet it didn't leak. Why can't we repair it back to that level?

We found a contractor we were very pleased with. They dug out around the entire house to the bottom of the foundation. They built a concrete flare at the bottom of the foundation that directed water away from the house, replace all in-ground piping for our 8 downspouts, filled the trench around the house with water disbursement material and covered that with dirt, removed a foot (12") of clay off the top of my entire back yard, dug a 12' X 6' X 6' hole, laid 3 large drainage pipes almost the entire length of my back yard and directed them and the downspout pipes to this huge pit, which was filled with some very high-tech looking drainage material.

They filled the backyard with sandy loam and good top soil. they hauled away the clay from my backyard as well as another 30+ yards of clay that we figure had been piled up since the house was built. They poured concrete where the pile of clay was, as well as adding 4' to my existing patio area, completely redid my crawlspace, and on the last day they were here, they installed an industrial strength (monster) sump pump!

Throughout the project we mentioned several times, we do not want a sump pump, we don't want to have to rely on a sump pump. They assured us, we wouldn't have to rely on a sump pump. I asked, "Why are you installing a sump pump?" they said, "We install a sump pump on every job we do."

It is February 12, 2026. All of this was about 2 years ago now. A little over a month ago, Portland received the most rainfall in a 24-hour period ever recorded in the Portland area. To date, that sump pump has never come on.