I Got to My Problems Through My Solutions

My husband and I purchased a foreclosure home that needed some landscaping help. What can be so hard about fixing a concrete block wall? Well, besides removing all of the blocks, hand trenching and reseting the block, not much, or so we thought. We worked in the cold of an early West Michigan spring and put together a mighty fine new wall. Pleased, we went back to our daily lives enjoying the look of our new wall and anticipating buying shrubs to put in it. Then one day, walking through our basement master suite, the carpet was squishy and wet. All winter, through the spring thaw, and the first big storm of the year, no water issues. What was different? It took me a day to remember that we had created a water way that ended at the foundation of the house including a damaged drainage pipe straight from the front eaves. Our beautiful and cost effective solution caused our problem. Fortunately, an inexpensive drain repair, filling the trench edges with soil, then growing grass there fixed our solution. We had to empty half the master and set up fans to dry out the carpet twice. Reviewing this great suburban drama reminded me that the best laid plans often have unexpected consequences. It is easy for managers to judge an incident afterward and expect the participants to anticipate that the beautiful landscaping would have lead to the basement floods. It would be like Timberland knowing that buying cattle hides, a by-product of meet processing, in Brasil would cause them to be austracized by Greenpeace. Sometimes we get to our problems through our solutions. In the middle of drying out your master bedroom carpet, it is not the time to decide who should have known that the trench for the block would flood the basement. Let's all try to stay in the present and get around to the next solution that gets to our next problem.