clangr
Thanks, John. I’m going to call the previous owners again and ask them about it–they seem geniunely shocked at what’s going on. They’ve called 4 times out of what I think is genuine concern.
I did find out from the previous owners that the French drains empty out into a drywell in the far part of the back yard. This morning I did notice that the entire back yard in that area is saturated, though because it is at the bottom of the hill probably not totally surprising.
It also dawned on me late yesterday that about a half a block away from my house there’s a 5′ 2′ sinkhole/pothole where the pavement has been caving in. It’s in a parking lot, but the previous owner had mentioned that she remembers when they were digging up the street there was some connection with my house and the supermarket to the infrastructure
The sinkhole started about the same time I started having problems, and has doubled in size each week over the past 3 weeks. I don’t know if it has any relation to my problem or whether it’s just a nasty pothole, though it doesn’t seem the weather’s been bad enough to cause it. I’ve reported it to the city–they still haven’t come out to check out my problem–but the dispatcher told me that they were really backed up ‘because there’s a lot of broken mains’.
Clearly I’ll be spending part of my retirement fund to have the basement waterproofed, but I still want to find the source of the problem so that I don’t fix the wrong thing or compromise the structure itself. I’m going to take a tour of the Public Works Museum in the next week, and I’m going to try and get a map of the infrastructure from the city/county just so that I can understand what is going on. Now, if I only had a connection in the government….
