4 Solutions to fix a wet basement plus Noob Mistakes

right I'm in Lowe's and something just happened that I want to make sure that doesn't happen to you guys I asked for their foundation waterproofing and they brought me to this [Music] alright guys we're out in a project and we're gonna be talking about wet basements and four main solutions three of them are the ones that we typically will go to first and the last one is more of a last resort type of a solution but you're gonna find a lot of companies out there presenting the last resort as your first and best option when in our opinion nothing could be further from the truth and that's the last resort I call interior drain tile because we always like to keep the water out first and foremost before we go to pumping resort to pumping it out and so today we're going to talk about all of those and by the time you're done you're gonna have enough ability to enough knowledge to be able to either do it on your own or when somebody comes out to give you an estimate at least you'll know what they're talking about when they're talking to you so what are we waiting for tenderness there know what the cheapest possible solution right now all right let's do it she could do okay so the cheapest possible solution is exterior grading right your your grading so you get the call I'm having water in my basement when it rains go out to the house and you look and first thing I notice is sidewalk lower than the grade outside of the sidewalk not doing any good here besides holding your water along your house like a moat when it rains you see the gutters above the the it's got gutters but yep you know in a heavy rain gutters don't catch everything so it has it's not pitching away from the house so the very first step that I always say is look up and look down those are the very first two things that you want to do when you're trying to figure out where to start when you have a wet basement you look up to make sure that you have gutters if you have gutters then you want to make sure they're not plugged up and then you also want to make sure that the downspout is routed far enough away from the foundation of a house that it's not working its way back into the house and I want to show you that this could be a possibility on this site as well let's go check this out right here when we look at this downspout a lot of times I've seen where this downspout dumps the water from the entire roof load and then what happens is the water works its way right back into the basement it doesn't now--if extending the downspout doesn't work because it just gets in the way like it did on this job we did you can bury a drain tile but you cannot hard pipe your downspout directly into a buried drain tile you must have an area of separation to keep it from freezing and Aurora and bursting doesn't no good so you want to make sure that you get that far enough away and that could be as simple as just putting an extension on your downspout and that could solve some of the problem but in this case we're looking at the grates that's your easiest first step to correcting a water problem in your basement so when you look at this grade behind me it looks like it's got a nice taper running away from the house but actually it's the reverse right now the grade runs into the house looks can be very deceiving that's why we're gonna be you a laser to make sure that we get all the grades established if you don't have a laser you can use a level and an 8-foot board to help you achieve your grades just simply pitch your board the way you want it put the level on it make sure that it's flowing the right way and you're in business now as we look at this one Tim what are you gonna recommend to these guys take the sidewalk out it's not doing you any good it's just probably a small thin sidewalk not a big deal looks old window Wells a foot high all you need is just to be able to bring this up you've got up to 1/16 inches from the spill plate so this is a great point that Tim brings up right now you can never bury the sill plate of a house and let's talk about what the sill plate of a house is the sill plate is the flat timber I guess that's the right way to put it it's usually should technically be green treated that meets up with the foundation of your house that the rest of the stick framing rests on so is this concrete goes up there's a flat board there and then the stick framing the vertical walls go up on top of that you can never bury the sill plate all right guys sometimes locating the sill plate it's gonna be a little difficult in this room it's nearly impossible just because we have sheetrock there doesn't mean that's where the sill plate is and I want to show you exactly where the sill plate is and what it looks like so in this case we're doing in this back room and that piece of wood right there is your sill plate and that's where your framing goes up off from that you can see where the concrete wall goes up you got that plate when your framing is above it don't bury that plate and by cold you should be six to eight inches below the sill plate and this is one of those codes that I highly recommend you actually take a little bit further I like to keep it at least 12 inches below the sill plate because what happens is if you get this soil too high up on your foundation wall when the rain hits it bounces back up like this and you see a lot of homes have black soil marks on them and we don't care about the discoloration from dirty water but we do care about the nation thus your sill plate the foundation of your house being wet dry wet dry wet dry and that's gonna cause you problems dry rot down the road right yep so in this situation we don't need to go that high if you look at the gray deer you bring this up six inches to a foot taper it out I have to say that's gonna solve the problem of water in the basement in this house and that's usually the simplest solution now when you're pitching it technically you should have one inch of drop for every eight feet of run so as you start out you have a zero point on the foundation wall as you come out eight feet you should be one inch lower that's minimum if you can be more aggressive than that all you're doing is making sure that the water sheds a little faster right now we've got almost a reverse pitch and a lot of times these homes will have a reverse pitch meaning all of the water instead of shooting away from it goes into it right right now this is the most when it gets wet this water sits here along your foundation and it's gonna find its way into your basement so your simplest easiest fix is grading now sometimes you can't great you just can't grade or it's not enough of a corrective procedure to make sure that you don't have continuing water problems in your basement and that's when we go to Phase two of our correction process and that's a French drain here just sits right here - yeah a French drain the way we would install a French drain is we would come in if we had permission from this home and permission from this house we would create it swale and right at the bottom of this well then we would go 12 inches below that we would install we would wrap that in permeable fabric then we would put 3/4 super rock in that French drain system then we put a four-inch perforated drain tile in that then we put filter fabric on top of that permeable filter fabric and then we would cover that so that there's about roughly six to twelve inches of soil on top of that and that allows the water to permeate through hit that drain towel and run out be careful wherever you direct a source of water because if you direct it behind a retaining wall it can create premature failure or this next jobsite this entire hill was actually destroyed because a simple buried drain tile off from a gutter let loose and allowed all of the wat all of this hill to basically wash out all right now the third option which is one of the most invasive options but sometimes it's necessary it's full fledged foundation waterproofing and that's retrofitting a foundation like we have here and we excavate all of the soil all the way down to the footing we expose the footing so the wall will come down and we'll have a footing it will rest on we expose that footing as well all the way down to the bottom of that footing we then take a waterproofing compound we technically we clean off the wall we get it perfectly clean then tuck point the wall so any holes or damage to the wall if it's a CMU a concrete masonry unit wall we then got a tuck point at a lot of times those walls will have chipped blocks reroll blocks or problems in them then we use a waterproofing compound over the top of that that can you can use any local waterproofing compound that you choose item in Lowe's and something just happened that I want to make sure that doesn't happen to you guys I asked for their foundation waterproofing and they brought me to this which is foundation waterproofing but it's only for the inside it's not for the outside so although this is the right stuff you can't use it on the exterior of your foundation so we got to go find that so if somebody tells you that stuff it's right the wrong here we go here we go here we go a dry sealed premium rubberized Foundation coating that's just the same thing just great dries gray this dries black black gray non fiber foundation coating so you can see that this stuff is actually designed specifically for foundations versus something that is designed sometimes they'll try to sell you a roof compound as a foundation coating I don't prefer to use that you can use also waterproofing membrane we've used that in the past those are a prefabricated membrane specifically designed for waterproofing applications now I had to go to three different stores to find this I started at Home Depot I then went to Lowe's and finally found the materials at Menards now this stuff is not as easy to work with as the rubberized compound but here's what it looks like well nobody seems to know any of the stuff that I'm looking for alright the search for this waterproofing membrane brought me to Menards I think I found it it's called plet on its dimpled and there it is there it is this is the stuff almost impossible to find this stuff but there you go that is the membrane that we we use to put over the foundation wall not as user-friendly as the other stuff to work with it's I've used it it's a good system some of them have a filter fabric mat over the dimples so over the top of these dimples will be a mat that goes over that just to keep this free because this is like a drainage so you lay this mat up against the foundation wall with the dimples out and those dimples act like a drainage board a much easier still effective system is just the rubberized foundation coating and I'm going to explain that right now success we've used the waterproofing compound then we've used a non permeable plastic over the top of that and insulation over the top of that and the reason we use polystyrene that pink insulation that lets the sheets of it is to protect the waterproofing compound and the plastic membrane that we apply when we use that system we put in drain towel at the bottom of that footing remember we've exposed that footing so we put drain tile in at the bottom of that footing we then put rock in that over the top of that drain tile we then encase that with filter fabric and then we bring in sand or a permeable aggregate which is important it depends on how much water you need I've actually backed your entire foundation walls with 3/4 clear another permeable aggregate is class 5 I've done entire commercial buildings hundreds of feet long 8 foot deep with classified because it was SPECT by an engineering company class 5 is a 3/4 inch rock that has all the way down to fines and particulate matter in it and you would think it should not be permeable by any means but it actually is it's just the weirdest thing and didn't see it and do the job myself I would have never believed it and then we bring that permeable soil up but then at the very top where the clay comes into that's where we switch to a non permeable soil so remember we're going to create the same grade in step one we're going to create that same grade but we're gonna create that same grade with a non permeable soil clay we don't want the water to get through into our system so we use the clay so as the water hits it tends to shed run away but any water that does soak through then gets picked up by our drain tile system and ran out to wherever we're gonna be outlet if we can de line it up otherwise it would have to get brought in brought in or can you even do an external pump you can we have I don't like doing external pumps especially where we are simply because they freeze up they're more maintenance when you bring the pump inside then that pump tent won't tend to freeze up on you and it'll give you better long term results just stubborn n drain tile down at the bottom water needs a place to go it's gotta go it'll find its way right back in your house yes yes exactly and so we've covered the three outside solutions grading number one which is usually your least expensive and least invasive number two is french-trained which is a process of breeding and then drain tile surface drain tile then number three which is full-fledged foundation waterproofing which is includes regrading it includes drain tile but now instead of a French drain at the top we put it at the bottom and then waterproofing the entire wall to make sure no water comes in and it just depends on how bad or what you can do and what you can do and then last is interior drain toilets I'm not a big fan allowing water in just to pump it back out because you can have that damp feeling and I don't like that damp feeling in a basement I'm trying to make it dry and comfortable not moist I have well done with the sump pumps inside they have the backup battery the backup system but on your power does go out and you're in a heavy rainstorm and you're dependent on that some phone that's you know it can be scary at times I didn't know if that's gonna fill in there here in a place butts gonna flood you're depending on a sump pump you know water's coming in sometimes you have no option that's the only way your basements gonna stay dry is some fun that's it let's go inside and talk about what we do when we're inside a house next so I don't know what's the cheaper option though like I would say between sump pump and outside that's probably similar what your that once you think digging along the whole foundation that's expensive exactly probably close to the same price as interior no it's more expensive so it's more cuts okay I have a the whole second oh yeah I know it's more expensive because there's a lot more work I mean you're talking about hauling all that soil out you know and then you're not really using it so you're dumping it then you're importing in brand-new sauce on a wall like this you're anywhere from six to ten thousand bucks to do a single wall like this now if they had been done when the house was being built they could probably waterproof this same law for six hundred to a thousand hours open yeah it was easy so it's all that extra work because your tuckpointing we're activity careful gooder than in this situation I would even say more than $10,000 for let's first sight that's not all four sides right huh so you're gonna get a small machine in here it's going to take you longer it all depends on the situation one of the things that some contractors do when they do this foundation waterproofing is they don't compact the soil as they're putting it back in place and then they leave and then six months later or a year later there would be one to two feet of settlement and then guess what you got water coming in so now whenever you put in working a lot harder to keep the water off so you've got to compact the link with the class-five that we mentioned here there you've got to compact that sand not necessary to compact you you still should hit it but you don't have to hit it as hard there's no binding agent in sand so you're not going to be able to tell that it's getting compacted but still you should still hit it rather well I've never knocked it back to sand either I was compact when I you know it Technica technically you can compact sand with water this is one of those weird aggregates where because there's no binding agent in it whatsoever you can lay it in place and just hosing it down will literally compact it enough because this is where it gets them to really you got to really know your soil dynamics but without a binding agent you're not getting that silt in there and then you're literally eliminating the void spaces as the water runs through it it brings this it shrinks the sand down so that is super easy to compact that's why I say you sand on this I prefer sand number one number two 3/4 clear number three then if it's massive areas like we've done I mean we've done we've done it where I've literally plopped an excavator down into the hole to move all of them get around on giant commercial buildings then you use classified because it's leave the least cost prohibitive it does have more labour but that meant that aggregate gets expensive really fast yup all right let's go outside like I said fine minutes ago so why don't we get into a house before we actually start to do any analysis and what we should be doing outside we always come inside to determine where the water's coming in because water takes the path of least resistance and even though it may look pretty obvious on the outside you may have a leak that is actually the water is coming in from a completely different area and then finding its way in through the foundation wall and so maybe you have a leak here but the problem starts on the other side of the room it's or it's coming up from underneath underneath then what he doesn't make a difference what you do outside you have wet soils maybe there's a spring groundwater can move around you know burst water can event some how I'll find a way to your house eventually all right we may be talking a little bit fast for some people and let's define the difference between perched water and spring water perched water is just a pocket of trapped water spring water is basically unlimited so one of the things that we do when we first come into a home as we look for the signs of where the water is actually coming in and so you've got to be a part detective when you do this and I always start to look at the walls that's where I usually serve and I start at the bottom of a wall and then I start working my way up and one of the telltale signs is yellow discoloring in the bottom wall no these have been painted so it's almost impossible to find but I will usually go look right in the corners so okay I can see we see some right there Tim can you point at that you can see that I'm guessing a little bit of yellowing yep okay yeah and some of this is paint on the water but this looks like it's almost a damp this little spot right here a damp wall a little bit of yellowing so as we come in right here these now this has been repainted but that discoloring right there is one of the signs that we look for and then I always look to see how far up the wall it goes now this this wall is actually pretty good even though it did have water problem it's actually in a pretty good State and this has been covered up with a waterproofing paint but here all of these signs you can see this right here it's really difficult to see but this bubbling this means that there was passed water problems here you can see where there's different layers of paint that's where the paint's been chipped off and you can see all through here where there was an issue but it was corrected at some point one of the other things that I usually will look at are the window wells as well so a lot of times I'll see…