Inkie's Hammer and Saw

Inkompotep Neferbath's How-To Column of Home Improvement

Q. Dear Inkie,

I seem to be having trouble with water seeping into my basement after heavy rains. What should I do? -- Anais

A. Dear Anais,

A: The kindly doctor of brick and mortar scratches his sparsely-haired noodle, and then his belly-button, and cogitates most fervently upon your question. He has come up with several suggestions.

1) Move to Egypt. Here, it is perpetual drought, and when the Nile does rise and fields aflood, people move back. At least in this case it is not rains, just Nile overfloods, and since the contemporary Nile now has the Aswan Dam, you never will have to worry again.

2) Bottle the water and sell it to yuppies in search of the nearest Poland Springs or whatever.

3) There's some sort of paintable substance that Inkie himself (yes, in real life) used some odd years ago to prevent rain "ooze" from "oozilations" into his basement. One is supposed to wait for said leaking surfaces to become dry, but Inkie has his moments of impatience, and waited for said surfaces to become merely "damp". For some odd unsubstantiated reason, Inkie has never again seen water ooze creeping maliciously into his basement. He thinks this must be due to the gods he gave obnoxiously craven offerings to, prior to the paint treatment.

Q.  Dear Inkie,

Whatever can I do about "ice dams", those unfortunate frozen morasses that form on portions of my roof, and destroy it, the gutters, and also leak into my house at odd spots when they warm up enough? -- Ice Maiden

A. Inkie attempts to give a several-part solution here, just in time for end of winter.

1) Move SOUTH, Ice Maiden. It was good enough for the migrating birds, it should be good enough for you. Egypt, for instance, is never plagued by ice dams.

2) As with Anais, consider this another yuppie water source. Bottle and sell. (Inkie wants royalties.)

3) Inkie had one of these once (okay, more than once), and called in a professional to clear it off his roof. Unfortunately said professional fell off said roof. (Yes, in real life.) Inkie was lucky in that he didn't have a litigatious said professional on said roof. Inkie now has a tool called a "roof rake", which you assemble as long as you like, and which will fall apart no matter what you do when you most need it, leaving bits of itself up way up upon your roof, where you are not apt to access them to repair it, but at least roof rakes have never been known to be litigatious, whether broken or whole. You do have to remember to use the thing for as long as it is cooperative, as immediately after snowfall as possible. If you wait, all those innumerable snowflakes, not one alike any other one, will merge together over your roof to form a Borg-like assimilated conglomerate of ICE.

4) Just avoid snow. At least anything more than those dusting levels of snow. Or take up the hibernation habits of bears.

Dr. Inkompotep Neferbath is by day a physician, but at night a home improvement guru.

Please leave him your home improvement questions to be answered in the next issue of The PanHistorian.