jackria736
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- Sep 30, 2015
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Hi all. I'm new so be nice.
We just had a sales guy here from a basement "solutions" company give us his doomsday speech complete with 800 glossy photos of how disastrous our lives would be if we did not give him a check for 20k on the spot. Now I am depressed and worried and seriously contemplating giving him my life savings.
I need you to tell me if this is bad idea.
Here's the poop:
We live in a 110 old house, built amazingly well and beautiful, in upstate NY. We have lived here for 5 years and the prior owners completely rehabbed the house from top to bottom (he was an engineer with his own building company), including partially finishing the basement.
Our problem is that when there is a rain "event" (read: not a normal rain, but a huge storm where it rains really hard really fast, or it rains nonstop for days at a time) our basement gets some water weeping in from the (stone) foundation. I have lived in these older homes my whole life and had really come to think of an occasionally wet basement as just part of my life, but now that we have a finished space it's seriously cramping my style.
We have a "waterproof" floating laminate floor laid on top of plastic on top of a poured concrete subfloor that is all relatively new and in great shape, and the walls are done well: set away from the foundation and lined with plastic sheeting. We have never seen evidence of mold although I'm sure there could be some behind the walls. When water does come in, it seems to pool in one spot on the floor and then eventually makes it's way to the "drain" (scary hole in the unfinished part of the basement where vermin no doubt swim.) Last night was one of the worst nights I have ever seen rain-wise: it rained 4 inches and we had a puddle in one corner maybe 1/4 inch deep at it's deepest and this morning it had all drained away via a small trench dug into the subfloor that leads to the drain.
I need to know what our options are. We have done a lot of sealing up cracks in the driveway and patio that border the house from the outside, and that *might* have helped. We have also run some gutter downspouts farther away from the house (a few feet) and that seems to have helped a little too. The house currently does not have gutters all of the way around, which we plan to remedy, but it does have gutters over the space where we get the most water flowing into the basement. Until we met with Mr. BS (Basement Solution) our approach was to continue to direct water away from the house, adding more gutters and directing the downspouts farther away, grading the mulch beds that butt up to the foundation and possibly adding some drainage (french drain or otherwise) along them. We run dehumidifiers like nobody's business.
But Mr BS says all of that is a waste of time and we need to have a system that removes the water that WILL GET INSIDE NO MATTER WHAT WE DO.
Any feedback? Should we just give him our money? Or is it possible to keep a 100+ year old basement *relatively* dry, or at least dry enough to have the finished space useable?
We just had a sales guy here from a basement "solutions" company give us his doomsday speech complete with 800 glossy photos of how disastrous our lives would be if we did not give him a check for 20k on the spot. Now I am depressed and worried and seriously contemplating giving him my life savings.
I need you to tell me if this is bad idea.
Here's the poop:
We live in a 110 old house, built amazingly well and beautiful, in upstate NY. We have lived here for 5 years and the prior owners completely rehabbed the house from top to bottom (he was an engineer with his own building company), including partially finishing the basement.
Our problem is that when there is a rain "event" (read: not a normal rain, but a huge storm where it rains really hard really fast, or it rains nonstop for days at a time) our basement gets some water weeping in from the (stone) foundation. I have lived in these older homes my whole life and had really come to think of an occasionally wet basement as just part of my life, but now that we have a finished space it's seriously cramping my style.
We have a "waterproof" floating laminate floor laid on top of plastic on top of a poured concrete subfloor that is all relatively new and in great shape, and the walls are done well: set away from the foundation and lined with plastic sheeting. We have never seen evidence of mold although I'm sure there could be some behind the walls. When water does come in, it seems to pool in one spot on the floor and then eventually makes it's way to the "drain" (scary hole in the unfinished part of the basement where vermin no doubt swim.) Last night was one of the worst nights I have ever seen rain-wise: it rained 4 inches and we had a puddle in one corner maybe 1/4 inch deep at it's deepest and this morning it had all drained away via a small trench dug into the subfloor that leads to the drain.
I need to know what our options are. We have done a lot of sealing up cracks in the driveway and patio that border the house from the outside, and that *might* have helped. We have also run some gutter downspouts farther away from the house (a few feet) and that seems to have helped a little too. The house currently does not have gutters all of the way around, which we plan to remedy, but it does have gutters over the space where we get the most water flowing into the basement. Until we met with Mr. BS (Basement Solution) our approach was to continue to direct water away from the house, adding more gutters and directing the downspouts farther away, grading the mulch beds that butt up to the foundation and possibly adding some drainage (french drain or otherwise) along them. We run dehumidifiers like nobody's business.
But Mr BS says all of that is a waste of time and we need to have a system that removes the water that WILL GET INSIDE NO MATTER WHAT WE DO.
Any feedback? Should we just give him our money? Or is it possible to keep a 100+ year old basement *relatively* dry, or at least dry enough to have the finished space useable?
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