Today is supposed to be the last post about our big summer project: waterproofing our basement.

Here are the previous posts if you need to get caught up:

• An intro to our leaky basement
• Comparing interior and exterior waterproofing options
• How we waterproofed our basement from the inside

However, I can’t wrap up this project because a week ago we had a torrential downpour and we had puddles in the basement. Wah-wah.

The first leak was in the laundry room and the second in the cold cellar–two places we’d waterproofed.

In the cold cellar, it appears to have come up through the shiny new floordrain.

In the laundry room, it somehow somewhere came through the wall. The rain was an extraordinary downpour, but nonetheless, my expectation from our waterproofing is that we would be waterproof.

The big selling point of working with our waterproofing company is that the work came with a lifetime guarantee, so we’re working with them now to make sure our leaks are truly fixed.

In the meantime, I can share some of our progress. Here’s the biggest illustration–and one area that doesn’t leak anymore:

Before (ish)

After with framing, insulation, drywall, paint, carpet and baseboard all redone.

I think the thing that frustrated me the most with this project–aside from the fact that the leaks are not actually fixed–is that we ended up basically back where we started. We shelled out a bunch of money, put in a bunch of work and it all looks the same.

But looks aren’t everything.

With home ownership, what’s behind the walls matters a lot. So that’s why it’s so important to us to fix our leaks, not just cover them up or ignore them.

Last week’s rain was a bit extreme. Up to then, we had a few other rainfalls without issue. In fact the night the crew left, we had our first big rainstorm of the summer. Matt and I were sitting in the living room, and I said, “I think I hear the sump pump.” Sure enough, rain was falling hard enough that the water was flowing through the weeping tile around the foundation and filling the sump pit. Talk about timing.

We love the assurance of our new sump pit and pumps. There are two pumps in our pit. One is a regular pump that is plugged into a regular electrical socket. The second is a back-up pump and it is plugged into a giant marine battery.

If for any reason the first pump gets overwhelmed or stop working (like the power goes out), the second one will kick in automatically. Considering that power outages are a real possibility during rainstorms, we feel very good about our back-up system.

The pumps have two alarms. The first will sound if the back-up pump comes on and second very, very loud alarm will go off if both pumps for some reason fail.

I also appreciate the finish both inside and out. In the cold cellar, the dirt and footings around the perimeter are gone in favour of clean smooth concrete. And the crew did a great job of making the new concrete nice and even with the existing floor. Where the exterior waterproofing happened outside the laundry room, again the wall looks super clean, even though we appear to still have some problems here.

At the doorway to the cold cellar, where I always did a little hop across the dirt at the threshold, the floor drain is a nice addition. The floor drain ties into the weeping tile which in turn ties into the sump pit. Given the water we found in the cold cellar, I surmise that there was so much rain that it overwhelmed the weeping tile and spewed out of the drain.

So unfortunately, I can’t say we’re all done. We’re hoping we get there soon, and I’ll be sure to share when we do.Save

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So far in recapping our basement waterproofing saga, I’ve shared a glimpse of the problems and the options we considered to fix them.

As I said in my last post, we decided to go with Omni Basement Systems, a company that would fix the leaks from the inside (for the most part… more on this below) and would guarantee the leaks would never come back (and never is a pretty long time).

Full disclosure, the basement waterproofing project was not sponsored. We paid for the work ourselves and didn’t receive any discounts or compensation.

We had three things we were looking to fix:

1. Leaks along the south wall of the house and around the perimeter of the cold cellar that seemed to be coming from where the poured foundation wall met the slab of the concrete floor.
2. Leaks in the laundry room where the bottom half of a former doorway had been bricked in to become a window (at the complete opposite end of the house from the other leaks).
3. New sump pit and pumps (plural) including a battery back-up system for when the power goes out.

Numbers 1 and 3 were going to be tackled from the inside, while number 2 was going to be tackled from the outside.

The laundry room window/door was located very tight to a corner. There wasn’t space to access the seam of the old doorway from inside the basement.

Working from the outside entailed digging down to the base of the foundation, a tough job at the best of times, but particularly unpleasant in the intense heat and humidity that has been this summer. This job was made doubly tough as the crew uncovered the original concrete retaining walls that had bordered the exterior stairwell and the slab at the base. Because of all the concrete, water had nowhere to drain and was seeping through the foundation into the house. The crew had to break up the extremely hard concrete as well as waterproof the foundation.

Waterproofing involved filling the joint with special polyurethane polymer sealant. The sealant will never dry out or recrack even if the foundation wall shifts over time. A membrane called Blueskin was laid over the wall and then all of that was covered in “dimple sheet” and then the top edge was sealed with a thick line of tar. After that, the crew backfilled the hole. You can read more about the process on the Omni website.

For the interior waterproofing, the first step was to access the foundation wall. In the long room (where our pingpong table lives), that meant removing the drywall. Matt and I did that ourselves, and I admit my heart broke a little bit after how long it took us to drywall the basement in the first place.

The crew then peeled back the carpet, scraped the sprayfoam insulation off the bottom of the wall going up about 16 inches, removed the bottom plate and cut about 16 inches off the studs.

With a clear shot to the cement floor, they started the jackhammer. The object of the game was to remove the concrete floor about 8-10 inches along the base of the wall and expose the footing.

Breaking up concrete is dusty work. To contain the mess as much as possible, the crew went the extra mile, laying plastic over the carpets, pingpong table, piano, up the stairs and cordoning off the area where they were working.

All of the concrete, dirt and gravel that was excavated had to be loaded into five gallon pails and hauled up the stairs out of the basement. Outside, it was dumped into larger garbage pails that were then loaded onto the truck at the end of the day. Such heavy, heavy work.

The cold cellar is unfinished, so less prep work was needed and the crew could begin jackhammering right away. However, extra jackhammering was required as the cold cellar is the location of our sump pit. The old pit was described as a “farm-special.” We’ve encountered a few “specials” around the farm. They work, but they’re not always necessarily quite the right way to do things. The pit was thick, solid concrete, so it took a lot of work to get rid of the old pit.

Below you can see the pit and our new liner ready to be installed. Note the holes in the sides of the liner. These allow ground water to flow into the pit, whereas before with our solid concrete pit, water had nowhere to go and ended up seeping in through the joint between the foundation wall and the concrete floor.

As part of installing the new sump pump, the crew replaced our old discharge line and extended it far out into the yard. Previously, the pipe had just dead-ended underground, and it was only about 10 feet from the house.

The new line extends nearly 50 feet, and the end is capped with a sturdy grill–a “LawnScape outlet”–that sits at ground level. Obviously, ground level is not below the frost line. The whole pipe is just under the grass. We weren’t able to lower the discharge line at all. We didn’t have any issues with our old discharge line freezing, and we’re hoping we don’t with the new one. The sump pump won’t kick in until temperatures warm up in the spring, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.

(“You really want a picture of me, don’t you? I’m much cuter than some pipe.”)

Back inside, once the footings were exposed, the crew dug a small trench around the perimeter and started to lay new weeping tile around the foundation. All of the weeping tile flow to the new sump.

Part of what led us to choose Omni Basement Systems to handle our waterproofing was that they used some different types of materials  and systems than other companies.

One of these was the WaterGuard Perimeter Drainage Channel. This channel sits on top of the footing, so it’s away from the dirt and there’s no risk of the line becoming clogged over time. However, it turned out that the WaterGuard didn’t work with our footings, so the crew went with traditional weeping tile instead. I was a bit disappointed we didn’t get the assurance of a channel that will never clog, but the warranty still applies.

Once the weeping tile was laid the crew added some membranes over the concrete wall (the white panel and black strip in the photo below). These membranes form a barrier between the concrete–and any moisture that may be running through or down the wall–and the studs and drywall. The membranes curl over the weeping tile, funneling water into the pipe, and then concrete is poured on top.

The concrete is smoothed and leveled so that it lines up with the original floor.

And after two and a half days of work, that’s where the job ended. Next, it was over to Matt and me to finish the rest of the basement by repairing the studs, insulation and drywall.

But that will be for the final post. Stay tuned for the wrap-up where I share the finally finished basement, the results of the waterproofing and our experience working with Omni Basement Systems.

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Last month (who else can’t believe we’re already almost halfway through August?) I shared some of the water leaks we’ve had in the basement. Starting today, I’m going to go into a bit more detail about the waterproofing process.

Up first, I’m going to talk about the different waterproofing options we considered and what we ended up choosing.

Option 1: Exterior Waterproofing

I don’t have any experience with waterproofing, but exterior waterproofing is what I was at least passingly familiar with.

In this approach, the foundation is dug out from the outside. You dig down the full depth of the wall all the way to the footing. Then weeping tile (that black corrugated flexible pipe) is laid in the trench along the base of the foundation. The idea is that water flows into the the weeping tile and is funneled around the foundation and into a sump pit.

The foundation wall is coated with sealant and/or membrane. And then the dirt is backfilled.

Option 2: Interior Waterproofing

Due to my inexperience with waterproofing, the first time a contractor suggested an interior approach my reaction was, “But don’t I want the water to stay outside?”

It turns out, you can’t always keep the water out. But you can manage it once it gets in.

The method for interior waterproofing is somewhat similar to exterior, except for the digging. In interior waterproofing, the concrete floor is cut along the perimeter of the wall. The concrete is removed and then the dirt is excavated down to the footing. Weeping tile is laid along the footing and is funneled around the wall and into a sump pit.

The trench is filled with gravel and the floor is repaired with new concrete.

Option 3: Interior Waterproofing 2.0

As we went through the meetings with various waterproofing contractors, we came across one that had a slightly different approach. They worked from the inside like the other contractor had recommended, but the materials that they used were a bit different. The conduit that they laid along the footing were guaranteed never to become clogged with silt. They had membranes for the walls that funneled any seepage or humidity into the pipe. They had all kinds of informational videos and patents on a lot of their materials.

Their sales pitch was that they had invented a better mousetrap waterproofing technique. And they would guarantee it for forever.

Our decision

The first time a contractor mentioned interior waterproofing to me, I admit that my reaction was something along the lines of, “Uh. No way, Jose. Do you see this finished basement? Do you know how much work we put into this? I’m not ripping it up to waterproof from the inside.”

After I calmed down, here were some of the other considerations we weighed in making our decision.

1. Given the damage we’d had to the drywall, studs and baseboard, I was going to have to do some repairs inside. Waterproofing from the interior would allow us to have one disaster zone inside, rather than two, inside and out.
2. The two contractors that recommended the interior approach also recommended focusing just on where we had problems, not on the whole foundation. Again, my reaction was a bit skeptical, as I wanted to waterproof only once and make sure we never have a problem anywhere ever. However, no one could guarantee that except for company #3.
3. Over time regular weeping tile, whether inside or out, can get clogged with dirt. It may take a couple of decades, but when that happens water may once again seep into the basement (see no guarantee above).
4. In exterior waterproofing, after backfilling the dirt will eventually settle. So a year or two after waterproofing we might have to do more work in terms of adding dirt and regrading.
5. If we worked from the outside, the whole perimeter of our house would be dug up. I didn’t love the idea of sacrificing all of our flowerbeds after I’ve spent so much effort establishing them (although it did give me an excuse to skip weeding this spring). On the flip side, I liked that the disruption would be confined to the exterior, rather than our finished basement.
6. All of the methods were within roughly the same price range. Money was not going to be the determining factor.
7. Company #3 offered a lifetime guarantee that we would have no leaks in the areas that they waterproofed. Options #1 and #2 would only give us a 20 year warranty, but I wasn’t sure that was quite enough for me.

We decided to go with Option #3, Omni Basement Systems.

Coming up, I’ll talk about the waterproofing process and then share the results.

I’d love to hear your input. Have you ever gone through a waterproofing project? What option did you choose? If you haven’t gone through waterproofing, what solution would you select?

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