Exterior Grading for Water Diversion

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…