How To fix A Wet Basement

all right so we've been called out to this customer's house she's having a problem with water infiltrating her basement the first thing that we look at whenever we have an issue with water coming into a person's home is the grades we have a four part solution the first thing that is the grades the second thing that we look at is is it possible to do a French drain installation the third solution to a typical water and filtration problem is to do full-fledged foundation waterproofing which means we cut all the soil out on the foundation wall then we want to proof that foundation wall we backfill it bring it up and then click happen the fourth and final solution in the solution we don't like to use if at all possible is interior drain tile we like to try to keep the water outside of the home before it can ever migrate in but in certain situations that's just not possible and there's no guarantee that'll work that's when we go with an interior drain tile now on this particular project we're gonna look at the grades and try to rework the grades the problem that we have with this job is it's nearly flat there's just no place that to drain this water to if you look in the background you can see we have a laser setup and what we've discovered is that we have about a four to six inch drop from the front stoop out to the side of the driveway we've got nowhere else to direct this water so on this particular project what we're gonna be doing is cutting all these grades down and trying to get the water to flow down and away down through the side then we're going to implement the interior drain tile strategy just to ensure that she has no further problems with this project we cannot do full fledged foundation waterproofing because we can't get that water to go anywhere and if we go with the surface drain towel or a French drain situation it won't gravity feed out and so we're gonna do a two part strategy fixing the grades around the house as best we can and and using that insurance policy with the interior drain tile system to make sure that she can get have a dry basement and give her basement finish so that she can have living space down below okay so we're back at the site and something that I want to show you we've graded everything we've achieved a positive pitch so the water will flow down in a way but there's a typical issue that most homeowners have that they're unaware of and that's the grade right up at their house what you see in the bar side of the steps is rock we see on this side is what we call the subgrade we've actually altered this subgrade we've changed the subgrade so that the water now will flow down and over the sidewalk instead of getting stopped at the sidewalk we've raised the subgrade enough that at the house we still have between 6 and 8 inches of clearance which is the minimum that we need to protect the sill plate from water damage what you'll normally see when you remove the rock as is on the far side of the steps you'll see that typically they'll have a deeper trench with the subgrade this is what we discovered when we remove the rocks we discovered that they had the subgrade at least four to five inches below the asphalt what happens is the water comes down and it has nowhere to go it stops here and it migrates down it finds the path of least resistance which is typically the basement and goes back right into the homeowners basement so we're bringing all these grades up so that the water will come down and run over it and then we can put our decorative Rock to cover the subgrade up but only after we've corrected the subgrade to make sure that the water flows down the right Avenue