Homeowners Utilizing Their Basements - A Few Tips On Surviving A Wet, Musty Basement
Winter is here, as the temperatures drop into the single digits. It’s too cold to send the kids outside to play, so where can they go? How about your basement? In the Winter, your house seems quite a bit smaller, and more and more homeowners are expanding downstairs to the basement. If you’re like most people, your basement is damp, smelly, and even wet when it rains hard. Not the type of environment you want to live in, or send your kids down to play in. But in as little as one day, you can quickly, easily & inexpensively have a dry, livable place to enjoy this Winter!
Whether it’s a new family room, home office, exercise room, or kids play room, your basement is the perfect place to expand to during the cold Winter months. The space is just sitting there, waiting for you to utilize it. You can increase the livable square footage in your home, and have a place to get away from all the activities going on upstairs. This increased living space will also increase the value of your home!
Why is your basement or crawl space wet in the first place? Wasn't the house supposed to be built with drains around the outside of the foundation, to take the water away? These are good questions, that many homeowners are asking. Exterior footing drains do exist in most Wisconsin homes. But, over time they have a propensity to clog. Ground water is flowing into these drains, each time it rains and with it comes mud and sediment.That sediment hardens, inside the pipe, much like an artery in your body does. Eventually, that drain becomes less and less effective, until it is no longer functional. Instead of your home suffering a heart attack, you start to get water in your basement.
Is there anything you can do about it, or are you now relegated to living with a damp, moldy basement forever? The answer is yes! There are a few simple things you can do yourself, to limit the amount of water accessing your basement or crawl space. First, keep your gutters clean.
Second, extend your downspouts, 7' to 10' away from the house.And third, check the grading around your house.Add soil where needed, so the grading is away, not towards the foundation. These three easy steps will help to remove much of the rain water that is running down, from the roof of your home. Where these steps will not solve a water problem, they will help to reduce the volume of water around the foundation.
In the event that your particular water problem is more chronic, and these steps help, but are just not enough, there are other solutions available that do not involve digging up your yard.You may contact a professional waterproofing company that specializes in basement systems and crawl space systems that are much less disruptive. A waterproofing system can be installed in as little as one day, from the inside, and offer a fully transferrable written warranty, for the life of the home. One of the most popular methods is a combination of the WaterGuard System, with a TripleSafe Sump Pump System. Any water accessing the floor from under the floor or from the wall/floor joint, or seeping down the walls, is contained in the system and drained out of the house with one or more of the three pumps in the TripleSafe.
