Protect your home from groundwater damage as a priority
Just as you would build a home from the ground up for strength, so should you make sure that you protect your home from the ground up. Protect your footings which can sink and warp your homes framing, doors, and windows. It makes little sense to take a home with home drainage problems and start your renovation project with cosmetics.
You may think this is what will sell the home, but it likely will not. The new paint or carpet at times takes priority over the installation of hand excavated french drains. Or the new furniture simply has to be the first indulgence of comfort in order to make the inhabitants happy. “Mean while, Nero fiddles as Rome burns.” Your foundation footings may be sinking, and floors, windows, doors, and sheetrock can be the victim.
When bad priority renovation logic is started, this logic usually continues. These homeowners are many times the same homeowners that let infrastructure deferred home drainage maintenance work slide in favor of cosmetic creature comforts over and over again, feeling that they are the most important. To these types of homeowners, they are indeed the most important emotional priorities.
The same homeowners are again seen crying about their home drainage problems when confronted as part of the home inspection process during the sale of the home. The same folks later cry about the fact that no one will finance their home without expensive and substantial repairs to the foundation or crawlspace spot footings as a result of groundwater damage caused by home drainage problems.
Most commonly these home drainage problems are solved by the installation of hand excavated french drains, not just punching a sump pump in the crawlspace or basement and passing the home drainage problem to the new buyers.
Gotta have that new furniture, paint or drapes you know. After all, lamps are more important than solving home drainage problems, right? To these types of homeowners home drainage problems are treated much like other problems that are most often more difficult, expensive, or out of site, out of mind to them. Management by crisis would most often describe the chronic home drainage deferred maintenance enabler such as described above.
In the long run, this homeowner has the angry, fear and loathing experience, as it pertains to home groundwater removal and the damage it does to the home, by selection of bad priorities. This is much like not flossing your teeth for years, and then throwing a fit when the dentist tells you it is too late to save those teeth.
The logical defense for not flossing in the mind of this type of person probably is described best by their statement, “but I don’t want to”. Oh well, as they say in poker, “read’em and weep”.