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My greeting when I get home


12string

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sorry.  Yes, so much rain this year.

I guess I'm giving thanks for the sump pump - when I'm lying awake in bed in the morning, the house is quiet and I can hear the pump running.  Today it was kicking on every couple minutes.

Is there anything you can do to keep the water from getting in?  well, I suppose there is but it has a price tag.

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I have to break down and get a drainage system.  This isn't going to get better.  Lots of clay here, it's a sponge.  When they put the 100+ houses in across the street, it shifted the water table.  Then the county re paved the street and screwed up the storm drains to basically leach the water into my yard.  It's gonna cost me, but I don't have time to do it myself.

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9 minutes ago, 12string said:

I have to break down and get a drainage system.  This isn't going to get better.  Lots of clay here, it's a sponge.  When they put the 100+ houses in across the street, it shifted the water table.  Then the county re paved the street and screwed up the storm drains to basically leach the water into my yard.  It's gonna cost me, but I don't have time to do it myself.

I had that problem as well.  If your basement isn't finished the solution is a bit easier.  Then the drains can go on the inside of the basement walls under the floor.  They will consist of 4" black siped flexable pipe covered in a "silt sock" to keep dirt out.  They are placed in a trench below floor level filled with small stone and capped with a relatively thin concrete cap.  Somewhere around the foundation there will be a drop to get under the foundation made of pvc pipe.  After you get out from under the house you run the pvc to a place lower than the bottom of the drop for a self draining system.  That last part may be difficult in level land.  I was fortunate enough to be able to get to a town culvert that was low enough.  The plans were filed with the town and I got permission to do that.  (ground water only, nothing else from your house.)

If you can manage this then you have a passive drain needing no pumps or power.  There are contractors who specialize in this sort of work.  I have no idea what the price might be today.  Mine was done 25 years ago for about 3000.

Oh, the cap over the trenches should have a small gap between itself and the basement walls so any future leakage down the wall will go into the drains.

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I will need a pump.  It seems to concentrate in one area of the crawl space and one corner of the basement.  I can run a drain pipe from the crawl space, and I believe a sump pit will adequately drain the sponge.  I hope.  But I don't have a good place to run the drain piping away.

When I was a teen, that was the job my father gave my brothers and I.  Finished basement.  Broke through the concrete floor and dug the whole perimeter of the house, Hauled all the dirt up the steps and out in drywall buckets.  Hauled the gravel and some dirt back down.  The fun part was keeping up with the concrete truck.  He ran a trough through the window but it was a lot of running around with buckets!

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18 hours ago, maddmaxx said:

I had that problem as well.  If your basement isn't finished the solution is a bit easier.  Then the drains can go on the inside of the basement walls under the floor.  They will consist of 4" black siped flexable pipe covered in a "silt sock" to keep dirt out.  They are placed in a trench below floor level filled with small stone and capped with a relatively thin concrete cap.  Somewhere around the foundation there will be a drop to get under the foundation made of pvc pipe.  After you get out from under the house you run the pvc to a place lower than the bottom of the drop for a self draining system.  That last part may be difficult in level land.  I was fortunate enough to be able to get to a town culvert that was low enough.  The plans were filed with the town and I got permission to do that.  (ground water only, nothing else from your house.)

If you can manage this then you have a passive drain needing no pumps or power.  There are contractors who specialize in this sort of work.  I have no idea what the price might be today.  Mine was done 25 years ago for about 3000.

Oh, the cap over the trenches should have a small gap between itself and the basement walls so any future leakage down the wall will go into the drains.

...and be very careful if you have a monolithic floor, because you can compromise your foundation. The house behind ours was ruined by doing that.

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11 minutes ago, shotgun said:

...and be very careful if you have a monolithic floor, because you can compromise your foundation. The house behind ours was ruined by doing that.

I’ve come to the conclusion that monolithic is just another was to take shortcuts and be cheap. It doesn’t surprise me that the builder didn’t do the drainage. Did they get the foundation fixed?

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19 hours ago, maddmaxx said:

If you have no place to run the drain the I believe that you need a "beehive".  It's like a septic tank without the leeching field.  It collects water and slowly drains it away.  I have no idea how well, or if they work in very wet ground.

Don't think that will work.  The problem is the ground getting so saturated, it leeches into my basement!  After a rain like this, there will be water actively seeping out of my side yard into the street.  The house sits a few feet above street level, so I can get a pipe there, but it's very long or tunnel under the driveway.

The house is 85 years old, there's no monolithic anything in it.

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42 minutes ago, 12string said:

Don't think that will work.  The problem is the ground getting so saturated, it leeches into my basement!  After a rain like this, there will be water actively seeping out of my side yard into the street.  The house sits a few feet above street level, so I can get a pipe there, but it's very long or tunnel under the driveway.

The house is 85 years old, there's no monolithic anything in it.

I went 125 feet to the road and 250 more to the town culvert.  :nodhead:

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6 hours ago, Longjohn said:

I’ve come to the conclusion that monolithic is just another was to take shortcuts and be cheap. It doesn’t surprise me that the builder didn’t do the drainage. Did they get the foundation fixed?

No, they are fighting with the insurer of the contractor. The "fix" would be to raise the house up and put a complete new foundation/basement under it. The house (a nice 1960's 3 bedroom 2 bath brick ranch) has been condemned. They had to move out and find a place to rent. They have since bought another house. The basement wall has since collapsed.

 

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19 minutes ago, shotgun said:

No, they are fighting with the insurer of the contractor

Too bad they have to leave it go to shit while they fight the insurance company. My first house I had to jack the house up and remove a collapsed wall and pour a new footer  and then rebuild the wall. It was a two story house but it wasn’t brick. I used a whole week of vacation to do it. A crew of about four guys with the right equipment should be able to do the whole house in one or two weeks. I was working by myself.

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On 11/26/2018 at 5:37 PM, 12string said:

When I was a teen, that was the job my father gave my brothers and I.  Finished basement.  Broke through the concrete floor and dug the whole perimeter of the house, Hauled all the dirt up the steps and out in drywall buckets.  Hauled the gravel and some dirt back down.  The fun part was keeping up with the concrete truck.  He ran a trough through the window but it was a lot of running around with buckets!

I gave my kid a similar job, he was about 13 maybe 14, hated the work and bitched like hell. I sat him down and told him that this was his future if his grades didn't improve. That with no education he could probably earn a living as a construction laborer, rather than flipping burgers. 

He did the work, and his grades went from D's & C's to B's & A's.   :hapydance:

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