I have a sort of weird thing happening. For years,we never had issues with water in the basement thanks to two sump pumps, one in the basement that pumps the water collected by tile and one behind the garage (the garage is connected to the house). The only times we ever had water issues were when the sump pump died on us once and somehow another time it got unplugged. Now the last two years we've gotten water in one corner of the basement 4 times, in the spring. The sumps were working fine at the time these mini-floods happened. We get a corner of the basement that gets wet (about 10x15 foot spot), it has not gotten much higher than the level of the carpet to this point but it requires a lot of shopvacing. The watter appears to be leaking from under/around the steps/door that leads into the basement from inside the garage. The water isn't coming down the stairs. The stairs come from the garage and the basement floor is about 4ft lower than the garage floor so the stairs lead down to the basement. I'm confused on why all of the sudden we have this problem when we never did before. It has been unusually wet here this year we had about 7 inches of rain in the last month and we had a lot of snow this year as well and the ground was probably frozen to 8+ feet. Another thing we notice is an issue is that the neighbor's yards behind our house are on a slope that leads down to our yard so we get all their drainage. We also had a tree and several bushes taken out last year that was along the property line. Now this year we get this pool of water (about 15 food diameter) that sits about about 10feet off of the corner of our garage and sometimes gets 5-6 inches deep when it rains. We had one neighbor pumping his sump water toward our yard as well but talked him into pumping it to the street. The leak is generally just in that one little corner by the door, nowhere else is leaking and it seems like only when we get a big rain or thaw. After the yard dries out, we probably won't have a problem the rest of the year but it has happened 2 years in a row now in April/May. We were thinking of maybe digging a french drain to drain off that pool, but not sure if that is the best thing to do or not. We were also thining of replainting bushes back on the property line as well. An suggestions?

I was working on my siding above a roof-wall juncture and felt a soft spot under my toes in the sheathing under the shingles. Fortunately it's over an attic over a screenporch. Apparently a small leak somewhere rotted the sheathing in an oval area about 10" by 8". The rest of the panel seems sound. Not seeing damage in the porch ceiling yet but I expect I will soon if I don't do something fast, as rainy season is about to start here. The question is what to do. I was planning on replacing the roof including any bad panels next winter (dry season here). I am hoping to find a temporary fix that doesn't involve removing old shingles. The existing ones are old, will be impossible to match in color, and doing the whole roof section now would be an problem because it will be raining every day soon. Is there a way to patch this not-quite-a-hole that will last a year or so?