Our daughter has a problem: a wet basement.

This is no secret. The spacious basement under the house built by my grandpa and great-grandpa in the 1930s has been leaking for years, but no one used the basement, so no one cared too much about occasional water in the basement.

Daughter No. 3 would like to use that space for storage, for a shop and for laundry. And so long as a little river runs through it, using a portion of it for anything other than farm-raised catfish is a challenge.

She has spent many rainy days outdoors watching what happens. Here’s what happens: Water runs from all directions right at her house! That place is a water-witcher’s dream! It is a magnet for runoff, a monument to house-size rain barrels.

She has mapped the flow and built little dams and spillways from gravel, topsoil and sod. She has watched as water has washed over a second-story overhang and directly into the basement. And from inside the house, she has studied where the water comes in and where it goes out.

As a result of this study (and frustration), she and I spent two weekends digging trenches in her yard.

We designed a new gutter and downspout system for the house to divert water rushing off the small overhang roof into a pipe that takes it away from the house.

And we connected that pipe to a system of 4-inch, corrugated and perforated drain pipes that will — we hope — soak up the water flowing from parts of her yard and driveway that are upstream from her house.

Her thunderstorm observations found that water was running along one part of her driveway and into the backyard, where it pooled. Another little river ran down a different part of her driveway and into the side yard of her house — much too close for comfort and very near a basement wall that becomes a water feature during heavy rains.

Last month, we hand-dug a 30-foot trench across her backyard, parallel to the back wall of her basement, about 10 feet from her back door and right where the water has been pooling. We installed a T connection and a surface-level drain at the point where water pools most often. And we terminated the pipe away from the house at a point where it will run away from, and not toward, the house.

Last weekend, we hand-dug another trench, this time about 60 feet long and about 10 feet from the eastern wall of her basement, and we buried the perforated drain pipe in it. We poured pea gravel over the pipe before putting sod back over it. This will allow water to seep through the turf and pea gravel and into the pipe, where it will flow beyond the house and toward a nearby pasture.

This was an all-day Saturday job. I don’t work out as often as I should, and ditch-digging is hard work in any environment. But this trenching job was happening on a farm where my grandmother once said, “If there’s one crop we can always count on here, it’s rocks.”

My family has been plowing and planting and ditch-digging on this farm for more than a century, and no matter where we stick a shovel into the ground, we hit sandstone rocks. On our longest run of ditch-digging this past weekend, we also encountered gravel that would rival a commercial gravel pit. We guessed that was a well-intentioned effort by one of my family members to help with drainage.

Even my very fit daughter, half my age, found this work a challenge. We could have rented a trenching machine, but we’re both too tight and stubborn to do that. (Our motto: “If hand-digging a ditch was good enough for our dirt-poor ancestors, we can do it, too!”) Plus, it was a good workout (from which it took me two days to recover).

We started ditch No. 2 early on a Saturday morning and finished after dinnertime as the sun was about to set. And then we waited for rain, which was expected this past week.

With sore muscles and our fingers crossed, we hoped for a dry basement.

Alan D. Miller is a Dispatch editor who writes about old-house repair and historic preservation.