Got Water?...In Your Basement?

If you have water in your basement, the first thing to do is read The Original Basement Waterproofing Handbook. Do this before you shell out $10,000, or even $100 on any work. Basement water is one of those things that requires a bit of book larnin' before you go digging around (so to speak).

This book was the best gift I got last year for Christmas. I kept interrupting my wife's Mario Kart-a-thon with exclamations like "Oh! Sheet Drain!" and "Look at this diagram--this is how our foundation was built!"

In very heavy rains, especially so during the snow-melt season, our basement has some "minor puddling", as the previous owners told us prior to sale. It dries out pretty fast on its own. I shop-vac it up in about 20 minutes and it dries out in a few hours. Pretty minor. It's a nuisance because it renders a corner of the basement floor unuseable for long-term storage, so I went looking for a solution. Jack Master's wonderful book pointed out that yes, I could opt to tear out the tomato beds, destroy the lawn, put in a trench drain and coat the foundation for about $10,000. Or I could use my incredible powers of observation to notice that the roof downspout dumps water right onto the ground at the corner of the house where the basement gets wet.

The solution: about $100 worth of flexible downspout pipe. The downspout now connects to this "pipe" and delivers the roof runoff to the back of my lot, downgrade, away from the house.