Floods, power cuts, dry rot? What's the worst that's happened to your house?

-- Tim (tim@newmail.net), August 27, 1999

Answers

Living in San Francisco, CA, we are in the heart of earthquake country...while most are minor shakers, knocking a few pictures askew and some small knick knack off the shelves, the worst happened in 1989, when we were hit by the hardest in our area in modern history. A scale of 7.1, on a scale up to 8, our house shook for fifteen seconds, which felt more like fifteen minutes or hours. I attempted to walk down the hall to the dining room, where my mother was under the table, and I was jarred into the side walls as I walked. I could hear glass breaking, and things falling around me, and came very close to having a bookcase fall on top of me. I finally reached the dining room, and had to tackle our dog and drag her under the table. We watched our belongings crash to the ground, just happy to be okay. When the shaking was over, we inspected the damage, cracks in the wall plaster, cracks in the concrete outside, and glass and belonging littering the floor. Outside, an eerie calm and quiet, as our neighbors slowly exited their homes..we all congregated around a small portable radio and listened for news updates...we were left without power for a week..schools were closed for a day. That's the worst thing that has happened at my home growing up....luckily nothing worse.

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-- Greg Barber (gbarber@gbdesigns.com), August 27, 1999.

Well, our house is at least 75 years old, so it's pretty much a piece of @#$% to begin with. My city is susceptible to floods, being right where the Hudson and Mohawk rivers meet (in upstate New York, for those who don't know your rivers... lol), but we don't get hit by them as our neighborhood is on a hill. (We do get some rockin' thunderstorms though... oooh, I love being home in the summer!) As I said, the house is old, so we have to deal with leaky ceilings, various pests' nests and infestations, an old dried up well in the backyard (which is now just a hole with a whole bunch of yard waste dumped inside... the well, not the yard), and just general deterioration of the house and garage. (We don't keep a car in the garage, we keep junk there.) Not to mention the unpaved driveway, the basement that ought to be condemned, and the untameable jungle that surrounds the backyard fence.

But, I'm rambling. I think what I'm trying to say is that we don't have many big bad things happen to the house, just a seemingly neverending stream of little things. Probably the "worst" thing that has happened to my house is last summer when we were without power for about a day, but that wasn't because of an act of nature, it was because the electric bill payment was late. (Oops!) (I could also bring up the time we were without cable for almost a week, or the period of about two months a few years ago when the phone was on the fritz half the time, but then I'd sound like a spoiled brat, and we wouldn't want that, now would we?)

-- Tim L. (mediabrat@hotmail.com), August 28, 1999.

Since we moved to our new house less than 2 years ago, we've had problems with those water pipe things about a dozen times. Every single time, it's around midnight of course, so the no one even realizes that there's a foot of water in our basement until the next morning. I predict this will happen again within the next 2 months...

-- Jacqie A (jax54@yahoo.com), August 28, 1999.