How to flood-proof a home: 'after a storm swamped my basement flat I renovated so it wouldn't happen again'

It had started out like any other ordinary weekday afternoon. Christoph Halstenberg was working in his makeshift home office — previously known as the garden shed — and it was raining.

“It was pouring for about two hours,” he said. “I was trapped in the shed until it stopped and when I came out I noticed that there were big puddles everywhere.”

Once back inside the Victorian basement flat, which he had bought a few weeks previously in the summer of 2020, all seemed fine. Halstenberg set about making dinner.

Then he noticed that the floorboards by the stairs made an ominous squishing sound when he walked around. Further investigation revealed they were also soaking wet.

He found, to his horror, that a huge puddle had formed under his bed, and there were pools of water in the living room, too. “The groundwater had breached the slab and was coming up out of the floor,” he said.