Complete disaster - advice or commiseration please

[Strawberrycornetto]

We are selling our house. Accepted an offer yesterday. Discovered today that our cellar is flooded. It's got about a centimetre of water all over it. I know it's not a dry cellar and I think it's ground water because we've had so much rain in the last week. We've been here 4 years and it's never happened before.

I am assuming there is nothing I can do at this point which will salvage the sale . Of course, DH is also away until Tuesday. Is there anything I should/can realistically do now to limit the damage. The cellar is full of stuff, lots of it in cardboard boxes. Not much is actually precious or inportant but is there anything I can do to start clearing up?

I am so so gutted. We are relocating for lifestyle reasons because I am miserable with my job and DS has been very ill. I really wanted things to work out and now we will lose the lovely house we were buying and I can only see long term hassles with selling our house while we are stuck here and unable to get on with things. Really think I am going to cry, why did this have to happen now??

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Oh dear, I'm so sorry to hear that.

First of all, things might possibly not be as bad as you think. Have you tried to work out how the water is getting into the cellar? It could be something as silly as a blocked gutter, a blocked drain something further up the road, or something similar. I'd recommend eating some chocolate looking, preferably while it's still raining, to see if you can see where water is coming from.

I don't know if this will be the case with you, but we had problems with blocked drains just after we'd had an offer in, and we were able to get them fixed on our insurance, and the sale went through.

I think that you'll need to take the things out of the cardboard boxes, put them in a dry place (spare bedroom?) with plenty of air around them to let them dry out, and then maybe put them into new boxes.

Also, is it a Victorian house? If so, according to a man from the SPAB at a course I went to, some were built deliberately with cellars that had among other things the function of flooding. Apparently some houses even have flooding cellars below usable dry basements.

It is victorian, and we knew it did get slightly damp. Am sure its due to the heavy rain we've had in the last few days on top of so much snow.

Am waiting til the DCs go to bed then I will go down there and see if I can move stuff/mop up a bit. There's just so much stuff down there, I don't know where to start.

Can't believe this has happened now.

It won't affect your sale unless the surveyor turns up tomorrow and even if they did it may be designed to flood.

Just rescue your possessions and chill (and don't mention it, you don't need to)

Also, are you insured - at least if you are it will provide some comfort if you find things are ruined.

Can you get some pallets? We used those in a cellar in a previous house - gives you another four inches before the damp comes up and lets air circulate for drying. You can also put up shelves on the walls to keep things off the floor.

Why should it kill off your sale? I would be really positive about it - say if asked that in very heavy rain a little water can come into the cellar but it drains away in a day or 2 and it's only happened once in the time you've lived there. If you are near a river/low lying it will be very common - all your neighbours will be in the same (ahem) boat. The damp proof course will normally be above the cellar so it's no risk to the rest of the house.

Did you really mean a centimetre of water by the way? It could be worse.

There's nothing worse than flooding - there's something about problems with drains and water that instill absolute panic and dread in me. Maybe it's because of the nature of water, it finds ways in and seeps up and through the floor, walls etc, it's not controllable like a simple mess on the floor or a broken thing - nightmare!

As others have said, it will seep away itself in the next few days. Meantime get some dry boxes and some bin bags and bring up a couple of boxes at a time, go through them and see what can be salvaged. Chuck out anything that is too badly damaged, except photos and papers.

Repack dry stuff and stack elsewhere in the house.

Ask your neighbours if they have had similar problems - you'll probably find they have and if they haven't consider the possibility of a burst pipe in your cellar.

In future always stack boxes on top of pallets in your cellar and make sure papers and things you really dont want spoilt are at the top of the piles.

Commiserations.

I wouldn't rush into mentioning it to the buyers/surveyor at this point - it's only a small amount of water (i.e. not ankle deep), and chances are it will drain away in the next few days anyway, so unless they're planning to get a survey done immediately, you should be fine. You know it hasn't happened in the last 4 years, and I'm guessing your survey never flagged anything up when you bought the house? A victorian house is quite unlikely to develop a major structural problem in the last 4 years - it's stood this long! So it's probably a one-off thing (either that, or the previous owner knew it had happened once or twice and chose not to mention it, knowing it was unlikely to happen regularly - which it hasn't). If you hadn't looked down there today, you would never have known that it had flooded, so you wouldn't have been able to tell the buyers anyway - which is why I would keep quiet and play dumb if the surveyor says anything (and just tell him you don't use it because it's too damp, so you wouldn't know if it's ever flooded ).

It would be worth asking your neighbours and other local houses if they're also flooded, as then you'll know it's not just yours - in which case, I'd say it was the high water table to blame, and therefore most houses in the area with a cellar will have the same problem. I think most people accept that cellars (unless converted into 'proper' rooms) are likely to flood and/or are damp, and therefore don't really use them - so unless the sales details promised a 'dry cellar' that the buyers have plans for, I don't think it should be a reason for them to pull out, especially as any other house they see in the area could have the same problem. If they like your house enough, the cellar won't matter - most houses don't have one anyway, so it's just an added bonus if/when it's dry.

Am feeling slightly reassured. Spoke to a male friend who's good at DIY stuff in DH's absence and he echoed what lots of you have said.

It really is only a centimetre at most. Most of the stuff is already on pallets but we've been a bit lax with that because we've never had any problems. Am going to do what I can before DH gets home and try to make sure the survey doesn't happen immediately. We haven't sold it as a dry cellar so I really hope its not too much of a problem. There's no way it would affect the rest of the house, its more than 6 feet deep (the cellar, not the water ) so you would need one hell of a rise in ground water before it got to the house.

Why do these things always happen. Grrr.

A lot of Victorian cellars were for storing coal and so were supposed to be damp to keep the coal dust down. As another poster said, there is only a problem when people state that the cellar is dry or try to use it as if it was, without doing any work to it. As long as you are selling it as an unconverted cellar you should be ok

Spoke to DH. He showed our purchasers the cellar last week and they asked if it was a dry cellar and he said no. So hopefully it will be alright, as long as we can sort it out before the survey is done.

And itt is still raining - will it ever stop!!!

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It was up to about an inch at deepest by lunchtime but the rain stopped about then so I am hoping tomorrow it will start to drain away as no more rain is forecast now until Thursday. I have bought a second mop and a dehumidifier and hope we can sort it out fully on Wednesday when DH is back home.

I can't see I will be able to do anything tonight so I think I will be just ignoring it!!

It has made me realise how terrible it would be if your actual house was flooded. I know quite a few areas have flood warnings today so I really hope no one here does get flooded.

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