Not all hippies stink alike-

Or

 

Why I hate the previous owners of my house with a bloody passion.

 

We have an old house - it needs lots of work.  Old houses *always* need lots of work.  We knew this going in and we were cool with most of what was going on.  We bought the house from some old hippies who were just leaving society to join a commune.  They were actually just going to let the bank foreclose on the house, but we could get it for relatively little money and we were looking for a home, so we grabbed it.

 

We knew it would need a new roof.

We knew the bathroom needed some work.

We knew that basement was only partially finished.

 

We did NOT know that there was a HUGE HUGE HUGE split in the foundation.

Until yesterday.

 

Yesterday morning I walked into the playroom and felt a distinctive *squish.*  The carpet was soaked.  In a place where we had never had water in our basement before.  Lovely.

 

We ripped out all of the carpet (well, my sewing and designing still has carpet it in there for now...) and then took a look at the wall.  B punched a whole in the drywall in the area where the carpet was the wettest and lo and behold, there was a crack.  A large one.  A HUGE one.  It went from the very top of the wall to the floor.  Upon investigation outside (digging up a front flower bed...) we discovered that the crack is all the way through.  yep.  Can see the whole fucking thing from the inside as well as the outside.

 

The kicker?  It has very obviously been patched and re-patched many times and then nicely covered up by fresh drywall. 

 

There was NO mention of this when we bought the place.  Not a fucking word.

 

B and I worked into the way early hours of the morning scraping and scrubbing and bleaching the concrete basement floor.  I work down there.  My kids play down there.  It's part of our living space.  And it's screwed all to hell.

 

So now we're hunting for a company to fix our basement for which we'll have to take out a loan.  ACES!  Fortunately, we'll only need to take out a few thousand dollars and that can be accomplished easily enough and we have a great lead on who can do this for us, but SHIT SHIT SHIT.

 

I thought about calling Flower That Smells Like Ass and Sunshine That Fries Your Soul (previous owners,) but that wouldn't solve anything.  It's not like I want them to reimburse me with peanut butter and rope sandals. 

 

Man, my kind of hippie just doesn't do others this way.