The clean-up in the basement is about half finished. It should be respectable in a couple more days, so I can finally get the ball rolling on the heating system. However, the more I clean and organize downstairs, the more problems I uncover. The moisture problem is a lot more serious than I first thought, and a do-it-yourself solution is just not going to cut it. More dollar signs. More debt. More questions about whether we are just throwing good money after bad. No end in sight.
Water, water everywhere
Well, maybe not everywhere. But there is a significant amount of water seeping in along one wall in the workroom and another wall in the rec room. Surprisingly, the one wall that I would expect to have problems, where the landscaping is about a foot lower where the porch used to be, has remained relatively dry since I fixed the downspout last year. I suppose that’s good news. Just shows that something as simple as redirecting a downspout can solve some water issues. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but I figured that once the porch area was backfilled and the interior walls were painted with DryLok, moisture along this one wall would be a thing of the past.
The rec room wall problem I blame on shoddy workmanship. This is common wall between the addition and the old part of the house, which, in theory, is now an interior wall so it should be dry. If only it were so. The fact is that the crawl space in this area is inaccessible, so I can’t get underneath to see what is going on, but from the outside, it is easy to see that the foundation for the addition has separated from the foundation for the house. I’m guessing that it was never properly anchored in the first place. I am also going to hazard a guess that there is not any proper drainage around the footing for the addition, so any water that gets through has nowhere to go. And we all know that if there is a way into the house, water will find it. In fact, I am willing to bet that if we tore down the addition today, that the ground in the crawl space would be wet.
The workroom wall is a sign that I am in over my head from a DIY perspective. The waterproof coating I painted on a couple of years ago is already starting to fail in one spot. The floor has some significant water staining which indicates that we have had significant seepage that was hidden from sight by dust and debris over the past few years. Previously, any seepage was soaked up by the 2×2 strapping, which was severely rotted in this area when I removed it last year. The typical DIY solution of painting on a waterproof coating is not going to be sufficient. Those coatings are great when you are looking for a moisture barrier, but in the case of actual water seepage, a more substantial solution is necessary. The pros will be called in. I have no delusions of grandeur when it comes to a major project such as this. I want that guarantee that the work is done right before I invest further money in finishing the basement.
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall
(With apologies to Roger Waters). Another complication with the rec room wall is that the structure has been altered by the previous owner for the purpose of a stairway from the family room addition to the basement. The stairs are uneven and way too narrow. They don’t come close to meeting code and my wife and I have decided that we can live without the secondary access. I will be looking into having a mason come in to rebuild the block foundation and block off the stairs. As an added bonus, we might be able to remove the stairs and gain access to the crawl space. Who knows what weird and wonderful problems we might uncover then!
That ain’t the way it should be
I hadn’t run our sump pump in a couple of years, which is likely a contributing factor to the water seepage. Our sump pumps its effluence directly to the drain from the kitchen, which, one would assume, flows to the septic tank. The sump pit has never overflowed, to my knowledge, while the pump has been disconnected, so I figured that there wasn’t any urgency to fixing this set-up.
Seeing the seepage prompted me to fire up the sump pump last week and I began investigating long term solutions. I figured that I could pump the effluence outside into a drainage pipe and tie it into the drainage pipe from the downspout that I assumed drained to the bottom of our yard.
After running the hose into the drainage pipe for about half an hour, there was still no water exiting at what I assumed was the other end. Perplexed, I returned to the basement to hear the pump running. After further experimentation, I am pretty sure that the downspout in question drains into the sump pit, which in turn is pumped to the kitchen drain, which I assume connects to the septic tank. This means that every time it rains, rain water draining into the septic tank. Something tells me that this may not be a correct system (I’m being facetious here), and is yet one more issue that needs to be addressed.
Okay… I’ve killed enough time writing this entry
Time to head back to the basement and get some more cleaning done. Every day that goes by costs me more money while the garbage bin sits in our driveway.