Brooke here. My sister yells at me for exaggerating. She says I blow things out of proportion. Like how I claimed Brown and I have done nothing for the last few weeks but bail out the basement.
See, we got the front lawn regraded and I put down seed and there’s a drywell and a drain system and the air conditioner was moved and we were feeling really good! about our progress until it started to rain like we need an Ark. Because if you get a lot of rain before the grass is firmly rooted, then you get a This:
For the record? We have done very little in the past two weeks except bail out the basement and yank the power on the air conditioner the second the sky clouds over. Also? That yellow rectangle with the AC unit floating in it? That’s two feet deep. Also-also? We hate this house!
Flying by night 
I think maybe you should get a refund from whoever re-graded the front yard.
As soon as the grass grows in, all will be well. Roots solve a lot of problems. It’s just getting to that point that’s killing us.
You’ve moved from buyer’s remorse to buyer’s hatred?
Dear lord… You have my sympathies, to an unutterable degree.
I hesitate to suggest it since I’m not close enough to help, but would a decorative ditch help? Perhaps with a homemade bog at the end? I spent a summer doing just that a couple years ago, so I can appreciate how not fun it would be.
The area behind Brown and the bucket is a decorative bog! We’ve been working on that in our spare time. It’s got a nice sunken drywell and everything. >.<
Oh dear! And I suppose the yard is graded enough to send the water to the bog? Hard clay soil is such a curse!
Sympathies. We’ve been getting drowned by some of the same storms up in Connecticut. All I can suggest is that you grade the area immediately around the house steeply, build a mote and a drawbridge. Oh, and crossbows.
Seriously, good luck; and if any of the clown-fuckery (new local word) committed on this house is Jarrell’s original work, I wish him an eternity spent with Gertrude.